Jenny sighs. “Oh god, what now?”
Rachel steers directly toward the people, pulling into the emergency lane and up alongside them. She turns off the car, gets out, and scans the hospital entrance. The weak, fluttery generator lighting is still on, and there’s movement beyond the admissions desk—people running. A woman is yelling something in anguish. Just an hour ago, this place was a safe haven amidst the chaos, but it feels different now. With its dim, flickering lights, it looks haunted.
“What’s happening?” Rachel calls to the young man closest to her. She recognizes him as one of the loved ones she saw haul a family member into the hospital earlier.
“They’re—they’re—”
“They’re coming back to life,” Rachel finishes.
The man stares at her. “Something, yes.”
“Where are you going?”
The man makes a dismissive noise. “Fuck, I’m not staying in there.” He points at the hospital entrance. “That thing in there—that’s not my mom.”
A woman beyond him speaks up. “It looked like maybe they were, you know, waking up. But then…” She melts into tears.
“Something’s wrong with them,” the man jumps in. “They’re conscious, sort of … but they aren’t human anymore. It’s like they’re, I don’t know, angry. I’m not waiting around to see what else happens. Good luck!”
“Wait!”
He jogs off into the night, to the northwest. Rachel looks after him, then turns back to see Jenny coming around the front of the Honda. She appears nervous, shaking, casting significant looks into the hospital.
“I need help with my dad,” Rachel says to the small group around her. “Can someone—”
“Sorry!” one woman says meekly, moving quickly away, shaking her head.
Two others come to her aid, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Their expressions are hollowed out, but they gather at the Honda. There are two wheelchairs angled against the wall of the entrance, beyond the doors. Rachel gestures Jenny toward them, and her friend hurries over and takes hold of one, steers it to the car.
Four women carefully extract Rachel’s father from the Honda, Rachel cradling his head in her palms, knowing instinctively that she needs to keep his head as secure as possible. She does the lion’s share of the work, breathing heavily as they maneuver him into the wheelchair, which Jenny is holding steady. After he’s stabilized in the chair, Rachel still holding her father’s head upright, Jenny begins pushing him toward the entrance. The two other women, eyeing the entrance, about-face and take off, and Rachel calls her thanks to their backs.
When she enters the waiting room, Rachel can see that the mood has changed dramatically. Where before there was a sense of panicked reaction to an unknown but inactive threat, now there’s an edgy fear in the room, a more blatant mood of horror. The waiting room has emptied. All the activity is beyond the admissions desk. The double doors leading into the examination areas are propped open, and people are streaming in and out. Rachel glimpses the back of Scott’s head, then catches sight of a more familiar figure.
“Bonnie!” Rachel calls.
Bonnie twirls, looks around, bewildered. “Rachel! You found him!” Bonnie looks at her dad carefully as she approaches. “Is he—?”
“He’s alive, but he’s hurt,” Rachel says. “I think he fell.”
“Let me look at him,” Bonnie says, ducking between two women who are hurrying out of the inner hallway. She is still shaken but apparently glad to be given a task involving potential survival. “Keep an eye out.”
She gets to the wheelchair and bends over it, immediately checking his head with her careful fingers. As the bustling continues around them, she checks his pulse and his breathing, checks his eyes. Rachel winces as someone—a woman—down the hallways screeches, the sound warbling higher into a shriek. It gives Rachel the chills.
“He needs a few stitches,” she says. “That head wound needs to be cleaned up. I’m worried that he’s unconscious, but his other vitals are okay for now. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
Rachel feels that she knew this diagnosis already, but the mere knowledge that he will now be under Bonnie’s care floods her with relief. Her muscles go loose and she leans heavily on the right arm of the wheelchair, feeling new tears coming to her eyes. She feels Jenny’s hand on her shoulder.
“Can’t believe you found him.”
Bonnie stands, touches her affectionately, and takes control of the chair. “Keep his head secure, okay?”
“Is there a room, somewhere we can put him?”
“Yep, here we go.”
They roll Rachel’s father toward the open doors, and immediately come to a halt to let a running man jostle past. Rachel scrambles to keep the head steady, then takes a breath. She looks up, and visible at the other side of the admissions area, standing between the double doors leading to the hallways full of bodies, is another familiar face.
“Alan!” Rachel says, surprised.
“Hi, Rachel.”
He walks gingerly toward them, a little dazed. The sounds of low gasping are muted behind him. He’s wiping his hands together and shaking his head almost sadly.
“Something’s happening with those bodies,” he says.
Rachel lets out a nervous laugh. Bonnie looks around bewildered for a moment, then cracks a smile despite herself—and despite the horrific noises coming from behind Alan in the hallway.
“What have they been doing?” Rachel says, already knowing the answer.
“At first, it seemed like…like they were coming back,” Bonnie says. “There was cheering back here. We were caught up in it. There was hope, people were optimistic. Something was going right. Then I remembered what you saw.” She closes her eyes, concentrates. “There was the same movement. The same kind of movement you told me about in the examination room. Just a twitching eye, or a finger.” Her voice sounds strained. “It started happening in all the bodies at once, and the family members were getting excited, you know, that their loved ones might be okay after all.”
“The same thing is happening out there,” Jenny says, giving Rachel a look.
Alan comes over to Rachel’s side. “So, any idea what we’re dealing with? What are these bodies becoming?”
“Something…else,” Rachel says quietly. “I don’t know exactly.”
“Whatever it is, it’s happening to all of them,” Bonnie says. “Let’s get him back there.”
“Your father?” Alan places a hand on her shoulder gently. “How can I help?”
“We have to get him on an examination table and stabilize that head,” Bonnie says. “There’s a private examination room inside the door to the right that we wanted to keep clear for supplies brought down from upper floors. But it’s still pretty clear, and the bed is intact. You can help us get him carefully onto the bed.”
“Let’s go,” Rachel says, but Bonnie is hesitant, eyeing the area beyond the doors.
“People are leaving this hospital because of what’s going on in there, and now we’re marching right through them,” she says with a kind of nervous disbelief.
They enter the corridor, and at their entrance, the low growling in the hallways ceases, leaving an eerie silence in its wake. The group pauses at the threshold, staring forward at the line of bodies atop gurneys. Most of the corpses have craned their necks, twisting to peer at them upside down. Rachel has seen this awkward, painful-seeming movement a few times now, and it suddenly strikes her as a shared characteristic. Whatever has afflicted these bodies, they have it in common, and Rachel is sure that heinous glowing orb is at the heart of it.
“What if those things…what if they get up?” Jenny asks, quiet hysteria in her voice.
“They won’t,” Rachel says decisively. “They can’t. We’re safe for now.”
She knows that if these things are evolving, they’re doing so in similar fashion and pace everywhere. What’s happening with one body is happening with them all. She doesn’t have any real idea whether she and the o
thers will have time for that observation to be of any help to them, but she knows it’s a start.
All she truly knows is that she needs to help her dad now.
“Alan, can you get that door?” Bonnie asks, her voice low, her eyes wide and lingering on the bodies lining the hall.
Alan steps around the wheelchair and opens the door, leading the way in. He flips the switch for the overhead light, which takes a moment to flicker on weakly. Bonnie pushes the chair into the room, Rachel to her side, still cradling her father’s head. Jenny takes up the rear, hurrying in and closing the door behind them.
“No, leave that open,” Alan says quietly. “I think we should keep an eye on those bodies.”
“Okay,” Jenny says warily.
“All right, let’s clear off this table and get him up there.” Bonnie gestures Alan and Jenny to the bed, and they take armloads of supplies—boxes of bandages, haphazard packages of sample painkillers, towels—off the bed and arrange them on the floor. The limited counter space is already filled with stacks of supplies. The far wall is a strange assemblage of multicolored, labeled bins filled with splints, metal braces, and casts.
Bonnie returns to the chair, and the other two follow. She casts a glance to the doorway, beyond which a chorus of low growls is rising once more. Those things know we’re in here, Rachel realizes. The knowledge of that brings gooseflesh to her arms, despite the close, hot humidity of the room.
“Here we go,” Bonnie says. “Keep the head still. I’ll get under him. Alan, Jenny, take care of his legs.”
They lift Rachel’s father, fairly easily now with four people, and his body settles onto the bed. Rachel feels a tremendous measure of relief wash over her. She remains at his head, peering down at his untroubled face. She tries not to look at the wound at his right temple, the red blood there, and the clotted and dried blood down the right side of his head, around his ear.
Bonnie goes to the chaos of supplies on the desk and manages to find some sterile gauze. She wets it with alcohol and tends to the wound. She studies it carefully as she cleans it.
“I’ve never done stitching, but I think I can handle it, if you’ll let me.”
“He’s in your hands,” Rachel says. “Thank you.”
“First, let’s stabilize that head.”
After some more rooting around, Bonnie comes up with a neck brace with a flat back that will restrict movement atop the bed. She secures that, freeing Rachel’s hands, and she gets to work with the sutures she finds in another box.
“Bonnie!” comes a voice from the corridor. “Bonnie!”
“In here!” Bonnie calls back.
A harried-looking woman appears in the doorway, her eyes darting around the small room. It takes Rachel a moment to recognize her as Irene. “Okay, I’m ready,” she says to Bonnie. “We have to get out of here.”
“You’re leaving?” Rachel says, looking up at Bonnie.
In the ensuing silence, Bonnie glances from Rachel to Irene. She shakes her head, coming to a decision. “No.”
Irene responds, appalled: “What?!”
“Things have changed,” Bonnie says, looking up from her work. “I need to help this man.”
“But—those bodies are alive!” Irene says. “They’ve become—animals! They’re alive, and they’re—they’re—”
Rachel looks up at Irene carefully. She’s suddenly very different from the emotional, seemingly fragile woman she first encountered when she walked into the hospital with Alan and Sarah. She knows it’s a glimpse of human nature that she’s getting; we can take only so much before our natural tendency toward empathy shuts off in favor of self-preservation. And panic.
“You’re right,” Rachel says, “something’s happening to them. But they’re paralyzed. They can’t move their whole bodies—not even close. I mean, yes, whatever is happening is weird. It’s scary. But they can’t really move a whole lot.”
“Yet,” Alan says.
“Right,” Rachel says emphatically. “I think that’s the thing. Those bodies are gradually becoming something—something new. And they’re not done yet.”
“And you want to be here when they’re finished?!” Irene blurts.
“Look, I don’t know what the hell is going on with them,” says Rachel, “but from what we’ve seen, they’re not on their feet or anything. It’s not like they’re zombies, eating brains or whatever.”
“What if that’s exactly what they become?” Irene asks the room, her voice pitched high. “Like, ten minutes from now?”
“Here’s what I’m saying, okay?” Rachel asks, her own voice surprising her with its strength. “If we want to stay on top of this thing, we’ve got to take a stand. We’ve got to figure out how to deal with them. And I think we have an opportunity to do that.”
“I can’t believe you actually want to stay here,” Irene says, looking from Rachel to Bonnie.
“Yes, I do.” Rachel also glances at Bonnie. “Not only for my dad. Jenny and I learned a few things while we were out there. I want to try something.”
“Try something?” Bonnie asks while bending over her dad’s forehead, continuing her stitching. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you.”
“Bonnie …?” Irene is close to whining.
“It’s all right,” Bonnie says, looking up. “I trust this girl more than, well, than almost anyone who’s come through here. She’s got some spunk, this one, and I think you’d have to agree that she’s got guts.”
“She’s a—she’s just—” Irene is flailing about desperately. “No offense, young lady, but you are just a young—”
“One of the sharpest young ladies I’ve come across,” Bonnie cuts in. “She needs our help. And if she’s got ideas about what’s going on, I’m willing to listen. It’s more than we’re getting from Scott. And I don’t even know where he ran off to, so…” She shrugs and bends down to her stitching.
“Look,” Irene says, trying her best to remain calm even though Rachel can tell that she wants to sprint out of the room. “I’ll say it again. I say we get in one of these cars and take our chances, find a safe place away from all this. Think of all the bodies in this hospital! We have to go to a place that’s not so populated and barricade ourselves, right? Wait for the Army or something. Doesn’t that make sense?”
Rachel looks out into the hallway. Even as she watches, two people stumble toward the admissions area, bound for a hiding place, probably.
“I don’t think hiding somewhere and hoping this all goes away is the right thing to do,” Rachel says.
“What, you think you can fix everything?” Irene asks pointedly.
“I’m not saying that, but I’m not one to cower away when—”
“You little bitch!”
All the women are silent for a moment, stunned. Irene puts her hand to her lips, immediately regretting the words.
Rachel is nodding. “Actually, I deserved that.”
“Okay,” Bonnie says quietly, “I think we have to keep our emotions under control here. We’re all in this together, right?”
Irene bursts into tears, shaking her head. “I can’t do it, I can’t do it! I can’t go back in there, I have to—I have to go.”
“Wait, wait—” Bonnie says, finishing a final stitch. “Okay, this is done. Rachel, if you’ll take an alcohol wipe and clean up the stitching, I want to talk to Irene outside.”
Rachel takes to the task wordlessly, and Bonnie walks out with Irene, who is shaking her head and wringing her hands. Jenny goes to the door and peers out at the bodies atop the gurneys. Despite the humidity and heat inside the hospital, she hugs herself and shivers.
“What are they doing?” Rachel asks as she opens a packet of antiseptic wipes.
“Same.” She turns back. “That’s fucked up, right there. Sorry, Alan.”
“How are you two girls doing?” he asks Rachel and Jenny quietly. He’s sorting through the supplies on the counter, aimlessly searching, not really knowing
what to do. “I’m glad you’re safe.”
Jenny sighs. “I’ve had better days.”
Normally Rachel might have laughed at the joke, but tonight it seems like a deadly serious pronouncement. She finishes up the cleaning, stands up straight, and stretches.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she says. “I feel safer in here tonight than out there in the darkness. That might sound crazy, with those things doing…whatever they’re doing.” She gestures toward the hallway. “Outside it’s so bleak, and … I don’t know … dead.”
They can all hear the restless gasps coming from the hallway.
Jenny gives a half smile. “Maybe that does sound a little crazy.”
“I know, I know.” Rachel is watching her father’s face. “I just know I want to be here right now.”
“Done?” Alan asks.
“Yes. Let’s see what we’re dealing with out there.”
Rachel, Jenny, and Alan make their way cautiously into the hallway. The low gasps increase in volume, raising the hair on the back of Rachel’s neck. Stretching along the corridor are the gurneys holding the victims—the dead—and there’s movement atop every one of them.
She closes the door to her father’s room behind her, then turns with the others to watch the corpses. The bodies on the gurneys are moving minutely, attempting to arch their backs. The arms and legs appear mostly immobile. The movement is largely confined to the head, neck, and back, and even that movement is spasmodic, twitchy. But the flat, dead eyes are fixed on them, their dry mouths open and emitting a hissing sound. The sight fills Rachel with a sharp dread, she can’t deny it.
A human stink fills the close, humid air, amidst the hospital smell of alcohol and disinfectant, and Rachel believes she can actually smell the recent fear.
She scans the long hall, and her eyes go quickly to a gurney ten feet away, on the side opposite them, where a female family member is clutched in the loose, twitching embrace of a corpse, a teenaged boy, no doubt her son. Only the woman’s back is visible, and her legs, which slouch uselessly to the floor, the sandals doing a slow, dragging shuffle.
“Oh my god,” Rachel whispers, gesturing.
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