Dead, but Not for Long

by Kinney, Matthew

  Lindsey checked the physical therapy room’s hall door to make sure it was propped open then went to the door between the two rooms. The horde of infected waited on the other side.

  Keith watched through the hall window until he saw that she had her hand on the door knob. He nodded, letting her know he was ready.

  Lindsey took a deep breath and then turned the knob.

  Keith turned toward the library and grabbed the doorknob, only to find it locked. He felt a wave of panic. The library door was never, ever locked. He opened his mouth to call to Lindsey and tell her to wait but it was too late. He saw her open the door then turn to run.

  Dropping to the ground so that the infected couldn’t see him through the windows, he crawled down the hall, away from the library. Once it was safe, he got up and ran for the stairs, knowing that he didn’t dare risk taking the elevator. The noise would surely alert the ghouls once they made it into the hall. Had he stayed to watch, he would have seen Lindsey make it four steps toward the hallway door, then trip.

  ~*^*~

  ~09~

  Lindsey tried to regain her footing and stumbled forward, hitting a desk hard enough to knock the wind out of her. The pain was excruciating, but she didn’t have time to think about it. She forced herself to her feet and kept going toward the door, risking a glance over her shoulder. They should have had her, but in their rush to get through the door, the dead had created a bottleneck. Once one of them finally made it through, the others began to follow.

  She moved as quickly as possible to the fire escape door, then paused to catch her breath and to make sure that the first of the infected saw where she was going. The man that was moving toward her, covered with gore, was a doctor that she normally passed in the hall every day. Seeing him was a shock to her system. These weren’t violent strangers that had broken into the hospital. They were people that she knew; people that she was now leading to their death, or their final death, depending on how one looked at it. Maybe there was a cure. She hesitated only a moment longer, realizing that it didn’t matter who they were or whether or not there was a cure. Their intent was to kill her and she couldn’t let that happen. She turned and kept moving, though the pain was still almost numbing and breathing was difficult. When she passed through the door to the fire escape, the doctor was only about ten feet behind her. It was going to be close, she thought as she began to make her way quietly up the stairs. Each step took effort and she honestly wasn’t sure that she would make it to the top without being spotted. Keith should have been at the window, providing a distraction, yet there was no sign of him. Two more steps and she was at the third floor. She went inside and locked the door before sliding down to the floor with a groan.

  “She’s one of them!” Marla yelled. “Shoot her!”

  Lindsey shook her head but couldn’t manage to speak.

  “She’s fine,” Jack said.

  “How do we know she’s all right?” Marla asked, warily eying the other woman. “She’s just sitting there on the floor, staring. I think she’s been bitten!”

  Lindsey shook her head, no.

  “See?” Jack said. “She hasn’t been bitten.”

  “Oh, right, like a zombie couldn’t shake its head,” Marla said, rolling her eyes.

  “Marla, a zombie wouldn’t know that it needed to shake its head,” Jack said, losing patience.

  “So maybe it was a coincidence and she just shook her head.”

  Lindsey managed to get out enough words to explain that she was not infected but that she’d simply tripped and had gotten the wind knocked out of her.

  When Keith came running in, all eyes turned his way.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in the library?” Jack asked.

  “Library door is locked,” Keith said, out of breath.

  When a hand slapped against the fire escape door, Jack said, “I think that’s not our only problem.”

  “We need to lure them back down,” Keith said. “I’m just not sure how to do it.”

  Autumn sighed, “None of you geniuses thought about checking to see if the door was locked first? I guess if I want to live to get my driver’s license, I’ll have to do all the thinking around here!”

  Keith looked at Jack and grinned. “I have an idea.”

  ~*~

  “If I don’t die from this,” Autumn said, kicking her feet as she dangled out the window, “I’m getting a good lawyer, if there are any left, and suing both of you! When I said I’d be the bait, I didn’t think you meant you’d put me on a fishing pole.”

  “Technically, there’s no fishing pole, just rope,” Keith pointed out. He had the other end of the line looped around his waist, just for extra security.

  “I really don’t like this,” Lindsey said to him through gritted teeth. “If she falls . . .”

  “She won’t fall,” Keith promised. They’d been over it again and again. Keith had built a climbing harness from a length of rope. The makeshift harness was what climbers called a Swiss Seat and was sometimes used in lieu of a regular harness. When he was finished tying the knots, he was certain that it would safely hold the girl, but Lindsey wasn’t convinced. She’d wanted to take Autumn’s place but Keith pointed out that Autumn was lighter and it would be easier for him to hold her weight for a long period of time. Lindsey hadn’t agreed to the plan until she tried it herself and was satisfied that the harness was safe. Even then, she had insisted on a second rope around the girl’s waist as a backup.

  “I’m going to start lowering you now, Autumn,” Keith said. “Let me know if you start to feel uncomfortable and I’ll pull you back up.”

  Autumn replied with a hand signal unbecoming of a girl her age.

  Keith lowered her slowly. “Remember to hold onto the rope to make sure you don’t tip.”

  Autumn, knowing she had no choice but to go along with the plan, started waving wildly with her free hand and yelling to attract as much attention as possible.

  The dead began to turn toward Autumn as they heard her yelling. Those on the second floor landing looked up to where the girl was dangling from the window and tried to reach for her. Higher up, on the next landing, one of the infected took a step, falling onto the others that crowded the stairway.

  When Autumn reached the same level as those on the second floor, a swell of moans issued forth as the undead moved toward her in a frenzy. One after another, they stepped from the metal platform of the fire escape to fall to the ground below. Those on the stairs and inside the building took the places of the others on the platform, quickly meeting the same fate.

  “Like lemmings falling off a cliff,” Lindsey said, watching from the window.

  “It was my idea,” Autumn reminded them.

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  “Why would lemons fall off a cliff?” Marla asked as she looked out the window.

  Keith watched as one after another of the dead tried to get to Autumn, each falling to the ground below until the fire escape was empty. “I guess they don’t have the capacity to learn,” he commented.

  “Watch out, Marla,” Jack smiled, “They might be qualified for your job.”

  Marla just shook her head. “I doubt they’ve had twelve years of nursing school like I have.”

  “Twelve years?” Lindsey asked, turning to stare at her.

  Marla shrugged. “I had a lot of bad teachers.”

  Lindsey glanced at Keith.

  He whispered, “She started sleeping with someone very high up in the college. Dean’s List after that.”

  “It all makes sense now,” Lindsey whispered back.

  Keith turned his attention back to Autumn, who appeared to be getting bored.

  “Now, before I let you back up, promise me that you’re going to stop the smart-mouth remarks,” he told the girl.

  “Keith,” Lindsey said, her voice low and dangerous.

  “Just kidding,” Keith said with a grin as he began to pull the girl back up.

  ~*~

 
Eric slid his mother’s remains down the stairs and into the center of the room. The victory was bittersweet. He had confronted something for the first time in his life. He savored skewering the punks that had killed his mother, convinced that they were also the ones that had turned Cheri against him. Now they were gone, and he had proven to himself that he was a man.

  Eric sat in front of Cheri with his mother’s partial carcass beside him. He questioned his own lack of grief at his mother’s demise. He had once been called a sociopath by a child psychologist who had tried to pry into his brain when he was younger. What the doctor had seen as a self-serving nature, incapable of empathy, Eric saw as resourcefulness. He felt an array of emotions like everyone else, but he was too busy feeling sorry for himself to feel much for others. He did, he reasoned, feel sad about his mother’s current state. She was the one who had kept his life from turning into chaos after he and Cheri had broken up. Now she was gone. But, something else had changed. He had a new friend and she also seemed to care only about herself. They had a lot in common. Maybe he couldn’t force her to love him, but he could teach her to need him. He pulled his mother’s remains closer to Cheri and watched her cloudy eyes light up. Stripping off a bite-size piece of flesh from his mother’s body with his sword, he dropped it into her mouth. After a couple futile attempts at chewing, the meat slid down her throat.

  “Good girl,” Eric encouraged her as he sliced another filet off his mother.

  “I think I was a Samurai in a previous life,” he said, as he watched her again try to gum her food.

  “The first time I held a sword in my hand, it just felt natural. It felt like an old friend had come back to visit.” As he held the sword up and posed, Cheri’s eyes followed it intently.

  Lowering the sword, he began to slice another morsel from his mother.

  Cheri rocked wildly in anticipation.

  “I think that’s why I’m so good at war RPG’s,” he said as he continued to carve into his mother. “Deep inside, I’m a warrior.”

  He loved that she would let him talk forever, as long as he fed her. He didn’t even have to listen to her in return. She wasn’t like other women. He instinctively knew that behind those vacant eyes was a mind that mirrored his. Not only did she find him interesting, but he could tell that she trusted him. He became fascinated with watching her devour her meal, the way she had barely swallowed and she was already craving more. Cheri opened her mouth, like a bird getting fed by its mother and he dropped another slice of flesh in.

  “Mom would be okay with this,” he reassured her. “She hated to waste food.”

  A few minutes later, he yawned.

  “Let’s save some for later. I’m getting hungry too, but I’d better have a little nap before I do a recon mission to the fridge.”

  When she started moaning for more, he put a piece of duct tape over her mouth.

  “Sorry but I can’t rest with all that racket, Baby,” he apologized as he laid back on his bed.

  “Give me about half an hour,” he told her while starting to drift off.

  As his eyelids closed, a set of dead eyes opened.

  ~*~

  “Now we need to get back down there and get the door closed and pick up the meds,” Keith said, setting the makeshift harness aside.

  “That was kind of fun,” Autumn admitted. “Maybe I won’t sue, this time.”

  “Hey, if we live through this, maybe I’ll even take you and Lindsey climbing sometime when it’s all over,” Keith told her.

  “That would be cool!” she said, grinning.

  He glanced at Lindsey again. “I thought I knew all the physical therapists. Are you new here?”

  “Sort of,” Lindsey said. “I’m from this area originally, but I’ve been moving around the country for several years, taking jobs here and there, trying to find the right place. My last stop was Jackson, Wyoming, where my mom and dad live. Nice place, but I couldn’t afford to live there so I came back. I’ve been here about three weeks and I’ve been working with Autumn since my first day back.”

  “It’s good that she’s got someone here that she knows,” Keith said. “This would really be tough on a kid, going through something like this with her family somewhere else.”

  “She’s really got nobody else,” Lindsey said. “Her parents died several years ago and she’s been moved from one foster home to another.”

  Keith thought briefly about his two sisters, hoping that they would be all right if the plague spread.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing she doesn’t have family out there,” he said, “under the circumstances.”

  Lindsey nodded solemnly. “I wonder how long it will last. I keep expecting the cops to show up and get everything under control, but at the rate that this virus seems to spread, I’m starting to have my doubts.”

  Keith had been having similar thoughts, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  “Nothing lasts forever. There have been a number of plagues and pandemics throughout the history of the world and I’m sure that people probably had the same thoughts each time.”

  “But the victims of those plagues didn’t get up and attack others,” Lindsey pointed out. “They just died and stayed dead. This adds a whole new dimension that has never been faced before.”

  Keith had no answer for that.

  ~*~

  Eric was in that twilight stage; not quite awake but not yet asleep. More had happened in the first half of the day than in the first half of his life. The previous few hours had seen him at his most cowardly and at his bravest. He had found a friend and had lost his mother. The world he now lived in was a different world than the one in which he had existed. Part of him hoped that he would wake realizing that it had been all a nightmare. Another side of him, a darker side, wanted it to be real. He was in charge for the first time in his life. Jack couldn’t control him, his mother couldn’t belittle him and he could kill without repercussion. There seemed to be no rules. He was the law. A smile cracked his lips as he drifted in and out of consciousness, unaware that the thing that used to be his mother was pulling its way up the foot of his bed.

  ~*^*~

  ~10~

  “Guess we’d better get back down to the second floor,” Keith replied.

  “I assume I’m going with you to get the meds, since I’m the only one who knows what I take,” Autumn said.

  Keith glanced at Jack and Lindsey. “I don’t know. We aren’t sure the floor is completely clear yet.”

  “We should probably check it first,” Jack replied.

  “I’m not scared,” Autumn bragged. “I don’t have to outrun them, just you.”

  “Never heard that one before.” Jack didn’t even try to hide the sarcasm, but he couldn’t argue with her logic.

  Keith raised an eyebrow at Autumn’s comment. “We’ll just remind them that the young ones aren’t as tough and chewy as us adults.”

  “If things look bad, we’ll send the two of you back up,” Jack said.

  Lindsey started to protest, but stopped herself. She wasn’t normally one to run from danger, but having a child in her care changed things. When the attacks in the hall had happened, Lindsey’s first impulse had been to protect Autumn and she’d done that. After sending the girl to the closet, Lindsey had crawled across the room to the door and had locked it, keeping out of sight of the window. Once she had made her way back across the room and was safely hidden away with Autumn, the guilt had hit her hard. There had been muffled screams coming from the hall and Lindsey had anguished over whether or not to leave Autumn to try to help the victims.

  Now she was in a similar situation. She badly wanted to find a weapon and help the two men clear the floor, but she had a larger obligation to stay with Autumn and keep her safe if things got dicey downstairs. She glanced at Marla, wondering if the woman could be trusted to watch Autumn, but decided that it would be a bad idea for many reasons.

  “All right, we’ll do that,” Lindsey said, her face betraying none
of her conflicting thoughts.

  Decision made, they walked to the elevators. Once inside, Keith and Jack stayed to the front with their guns ready, keeping Lindsey and Autumn behind them. When the door opened, Keith stepped out quickly and turned left while Jack took the right. It appeared to be clear but they checked both halls, killing a couple of zombies that had decided to stay behind, along with some crawlers who had been too slow to join the party. Once they were fairly certain that the floor was clear, they closed the fire exit door. The pharmacy was the last stop.

  “Wonder if the local gun shops do deliveries,” Keith said, hesitating outside the door. He checked the gun again and was not happy to see that he only had two bullets left.

  “I hear you,” replied Jack. He turned to Lindsey. “I suggest you two stay back until we know who or what’s in the pharmacy.”

  “All right,” Lindsey said, “we’ll yell if we see anything coming.”

  “Ready?” Keith asked.

  He pulled the door open and watched for movement inside.

  The pharmacy waiting area was dark so Keith flipped on the lights. One of the fluorescent bulbs flickered as it fought to come on, casting a strobe-like effect on the blood-stained walls. Jack scanned the room, gun raised and ready for anything lurking in the corners. A body lay in the shadows in the far corner but it didn’t seem to be moving.

  “Looks like a slaughter house in here,” Jack said, eyes traveling over the walls. After checking all of the normal places that a person could hide, he relaxed. He didn’t notice a creature, devoid of a body from the chest down, crawling from its hiding place from beneath an end table.

  “Looks like it’s clear,” he said with a bit of surprise in his voice. “I hope you have a way to get behind the counter. That’s one key they don’t even allow security to have. If not, we’ll have to be creative.”