Jack cocked his head and looked as Snake.
“You don’t suppose he brought his zombie girlfriend here, do you?”
“Zombie girlfriend?” Snake asked, not sure he wanted to know.
Jack explained what Eric had told them in his earlier calls on the radio.
Snake’s eyes widened and he grabbed the phone again.
“Watch the woman,” he said. “If she acts infected, shoot her.”
“I guess we’d better get down there,” Jack said with a sigh.
The bikers opened the door and Eric herded Cheri and the children out of the cab towards the entrance. Several bikers pointed their rifles at the approaching dead, ready to fire if they got too close.
“Lower your firearms, men,” Eric ordered. “I’ve got a cleaner way to control these things.”
He walked to the back of the truck and grabbed the nozzle of the hose and pointed it at a group of the infected, now uncomfortably close.
“Eat water,” he yelled as he twisted the nozzle to release a small stream of water, which quickly dropped to a trickle. Lowering his eyes, he watched in horror as the hose went flat just past the tire he had parked on top of it. As he lifted his eyes back up, one creature was so close he could see the pus dripping from its eyeball.
“Shoot it!” Eric yelled, backing up as quickly as possible.
“It’s too close!” one of the bikers yelled. Eric swung the hose in desperation, hoping to land a lucky shot to the head. He was slightly off target and the hose wrapped around the neck of the dead man. Unfortunately, it swung back at Eric and the metal nozzle smashed against his temple.
When Eric regained consciousness, he found himself on a cot in the ER, several bikers looking down at him. Jack stood nearby.
“You’re lucky Moose is a good shot,” one biker told Eric.
“But I missed,” Moose said. “I hit the zombie instead.”
“You need to work on that aim, buddy,” said Wombat, the Australian biker. He slapped Moose on the shoulder. “Should’ve aimed for the head.”
“I will next time,” Moose growled, looking down at Eric. “You know how many hours we spent on that concrete?”
One of the bikers lifted his rifle and pointed it toward Cheri. “She ain’t quite right. I think she’s turning or something.”
Eric jumped up and ran toward Cheri.
“Don’t shoot!” he shouted, positioning himself between Cheri and the gun. “She’s having some sort of breakdown. I’ve been trained to recognize the psychological effects of stress, and she’s definitely suffering from paranoia; probably from some past relationship that she never quite got over.”
“She’s catatonic,” Snake corrected him. “Dude, you make my guys look like a bunch of Harvard scholars.”
Snake approached Cheri. “Can you speak?”
She stood motionless, completely unaware of her environment.
“How long’s she been like this?” Snake asked.
“Oh, since last night,” Eric replied.
“Any trauma?” Snake asked, rubbing his beard as he watched her standing motionless.
“Nope,” Eric said. “I had to take out a zombie before it could get her or the kids.”
“He’s a big fat liar!” Jon said, pointing at Eric. “He didn’t kill the crazy man. Mommy did.”
Snake knelt down eye level to the child. “Did the crazy dude hurt Mommy?”
“I don’t know,” Jon replied. “He was trying to get us in the room, but Mommy shot him before he got in.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “He looked like Daddy, but he really wasn’t.”
Snake motioned for Moose.
“Why don’t you take these kids to the cafeteria and get ‘em some food.”
When the children had gone, Snake turned to Eric. His smile had become a scowl that made Eric take a step back.
“I’ve terminated several hundred of these mindless pieces of crap in the past few days. One more won’t bother me a bit. You lie to me again, I’ll put you outside and laugh while you get torn to pieces. Now, tell me what happened.”
Eric explained everything from the beginning, with a great deal of new-found humility.
“So, she had to blow her husband’s brains out before he ate her kids,” Snake summarized. “Dude. That’s trauma.”
Snake approached Cheri and grabbed her arm. He lifted it above her head and let go. The arm stayed in its new position.
“Catatonic Schizophrenia,” Snake said. “Happened to one of my buddies in ‘Nam. You could put a gun to his head and he wouldn’t move. Something just clicks off in the brain.”
“So you can just do anything you want to her and she’ll just go along with it?” Eric replied, trying to hide what he was thinking.
“Yep,” Snake replied. “But she’ll probably remember everything that happened during her stupor once she snaps out of it; especially you trying to take credit for her saving your sorry rear end.”
Eric gulped, hoping she wouldn’t return too soon.
Snake watched as the bead of sweat dribbled down Eric’s forehead. He knew there were promising treatments for Cheri’s condition and he was anxious to see the confrontation that was sure to ensue.
“Let’s find this lady a doctor,” Snake said. Then they were in darkness.
~*^*~
~21~
“Somebody forget to pay the light bill . . . again?” Snake joked nervously.
As they sat in the dark, Snake talked to one of the CNAs to pass the time, hoping the power failure was temporary.
In the lab, Doune lit a lantern and went back to work. Autumn didn’t seem to have a problem with it, but Lindsey started feeling claustrophobic in the small dark room. She went out to the ER waiting room which was just as dark, but more open.
Within two minutes, the power came back on, though it got everybody wondering just how long the generator would last.
“We’re going to need more diesel fuel,” Jack said. “We have maybe a two-week supply and that’s if we use it sparingly. So far the electricity has been off almost as much as it’s been on, so we may have to depend on the generator completely before long and it needs a lot of work.”
“That’s not all we need,” Lindsey pointed out. “If help doesn’t come soon, we’re going to start running out of food. We also have an extremely limited supply of meds for the patients.”
“I doubt that the local grocery store and pharmacy will still be open,” Jack pointed out.
“Well, we have to do something. We can’t let our patients die,” Lindsey said.
“We have enough food for a week or so,” Snake told them. “The freezer is pretty full and there are a lot of canned goods. Let’s give it a couple days and see if anybody is still out there to get things under control before we go crazy and start looting.”
“Your guys have been picking stuff up at the home improvement store,” Lindsey pointed out. “Was it still open?”
Snake shrugged and said, “No, but we left an IOU in the register with a list of what we took.”
“Seriously?” Lindsey asked.
“Seriously,” Snake said. “Without the materials to block off those windows and doors, we’d all be dead now. Maybe the stuff we took for the wall wasn’t quite as necessary, but then again, with all the dead I’m seeing out there today, it just might end up saving our butts. We took what we needed to keep us all alive. But if everything is back to normal in a week, I want to make sure that we do what’s right and go back and pay for what we took.”
Lindsey thought this over and nodded. What choice did they have, really? This seemed to be a decent solution that should be fair to all.
“Listen to this. We got something on the TV,” said one of the bikers, a portly man that Snake had dubbed “Smiley” due to his gold front tooth that shone when he smiled.
The others walked over to join him.
A man in uniform stood at a podium and Lindsey thought she recognized him as a general who was often in the news. This
was verified when his name was flashed across the bottom of the screen along with some information about where the press conference was being held.
“Central America has been blocked off completely, that’s a fact,” said the general who seemed to be trying to send the message out that everything was under control. “The Panama Canal has been closed down and is being carefully guarded by troops from Colombia, with the help of other South American countries. We’re all working together to get this under control.”
“And what about containing it to the north?” a dark-haired male reporter asked. “It’ll just spread up through Mexico.”
“There are U.S. and Mexican troops along a two hundred mile section of land in southern Mexico. It’s close to the border of Guatemala.”
A map flashed on the screen, showing the southern end of the Gulf of Mexico with the city of Coatzacoalcos highlighted. Salina Cruz was highlighted as well, about two hundred miles to the south of Coatzacoalcos and a highlighted line flashed on the screen between the two cities.
“A fence has been erected along this stretch and it is being well-guarded. We’ve had offers of more troops from other countries as well so manpower will not be an issue. We have complete confidence that we can keep the infected from passing through the two barriers.”
“What about boats?” someone asked. “There was that raft with infected refugees that was found not far from Florida.”
“And they were apprehended before reaching land,” the general said quickly. “Our Coast Guard and Navy are vigilantly patrolling our shores.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” asked a blond woman reporter. “We’ve got outbreaks in at least four cities in Mexico and three U.S. cities. These can be traced to infected persons flying in from Central America. Then there’s the most recent outbreak in Springfield, Missouri.”
“Which was quickly contained,” the general noted.
“Right,” the blond nodded, “but what about Salt Lake City; the group of missionaries that returned from Central America and infected most of the flight before they landed? We hear that the military is losing the battle there. The whole city has been devastated by this plague along with Lansing, Michigan. A bartender from a cruise ship flew back and went straight to the hospital. It spread from there and now the whole city is overrun.”
“That was also contained,” the general said. “The hospital was closed down and the situation is under control.”
There was a chorus of ‘what?’ and ‘liar’ and ‘you’ve got to be kidding’ before someone hushed those in the ER so that they could hear the rest.
“So Lansing is safe now?” the woman asked.
“Yes, it is,” he replied. “We have five thousand troops on the ground there as well as helicopters in the air. When we get a report, it is dealt with immediately, but we have full confidence that Salt Lake is our only problem in the U.S. at the moment and we are close to having it contained.”
“I have a caller on the line from Lansing now,” someone said offscreen. “I’d like to put them on. “Hello?” There was a long pause. “I guess he hung up, but he said that Lansing was a war zone.”
“You need to check your sources a little better,” the General insisted. “I repeat; the situation in Lansing has been controlled.”
The picture suddenly disappeared from the TV and was replaced by an emergency signal. The biker tried the other channels with the same results.
“Can you believe this?” a CNA asked. “Have we been cut off?”
“Looks like it,” Dr. Chan replied. “Not that I’m surprised. They’re probably trying to avoid a panic but it makes me wonder how many other cities are under control.”
“I’ve got no phone service now,” someone else said, holding up a cell phone. Others picked up their phones to check as well, with the same results.
“And what was that about the five thousand troops on the ground? Has anybody seen a single military vehicle anywhere? How can they not know we’ve been overrun?”
“I don’t like this,” Lindsey said, going back to the lab to update Doune on what they’d heard.
~*~
The military arrived the next day. Several black helicopters flew over the neighborhood slowly. Jack ran up to the roof and waved his hands in the air to get their attention, but there was no indication that they saw him. Eric and a couple of the bikers followed and soon they were all waving frantically. One of the utility helicopters finally turned around and came back toward the hospital. It landed on the roof while an Apache attack helicopter hovered ominously nearby.
After a few moments, the pilot stepped out with an armed guard and walked over to the group assembled on the roof. He introduced himself as 2nd Lieutenant, Lee Reynolds, U.S. Army.
Jack introduced himself and the others and before long, Snake joined them as well. While Eric walked over to chat with the guard, who was also the copilot, Jack and Snake questioned Reynolds on the outbreak.
“I don’t know a whole lot, myself,” Reynolds admitted. “It’s not just Lansing. There are outbreaks in several cities but we’re doing our best to contain them.”
“Is all of Lansing like this?” Jack asked gesturing toward the area around the hospital. “Snake and his guys have been out there a few times and it sounds like it’s completely overrun.”
“We only covered a small part of the city,” Snake admitted, “but what we saw was pretty nasty.”
“Unfortunately, the whole city is a mess,” Reynolds admitted. “We’ve given up on trying to stop the outbreak here and are just working on containment and getting survivors out.”
“So it’s safe outside the city?” Jack asked.
“Well, it’s safer than it is here, but I don’t know how long that’ll last,” Reynolds admitted. “From what I hear, our guys in the rural areas are busy night and day stopping small outbreaks before they can turn into big ones. In the first few hours, people left the city in droves and a lot of them brought infected friends and relatives with them. Some of them didn’t get far, but we know that others did, because we’ve found infected all over the state with Lansing addresses on their driver’s licenses.
“So where are you taking the survivors?” Snake asked.
“We’re working on getting large shelters set up in remote rural areas,” Reynolds said. “At the moment we’re still putting fences up and bringing in supplies. Until that’s done, survivors are going to temporary shelters outside of Lansing.”
Jack nodded. “I feel pretty safe here right now. Snake and his men reinforced our first floor windows and doors with cinder block and brick and we’re working on walling in the parking lot.”
“Excellent,” Reynolds said, pulling out a small notebook and jotting something down. “Tell me, do you think you could take in some survivors until we finish up with the rural shelters? We’re running out of room at the other temporary facilities. Also, every time we have to do a transport out of town, it costs valuable time and lives are at stake.”
“We have some room, but we’re getting pretty low on food and supplies,” Jack said.
“We can get you what you need,” Reynolds said, jotting down a few more notes. “Get a list together and I’ll pick it up tomorrow. We’ll drop off some basic supplies at that time.”
“If things get worse, we may have to evacuate,” Jack said. “Will you help with that?”
“If your situation here becomes dire, we’ll try to figure something out,” the pilot promised.
As the Lieutenant turned to leave, one of the bikers said, “Hey, one of your generals announced yesterday on TV that Lansing was contained.”
Reynolds shook his head. “Not even close. I think they’re trying to avoid panic, but Lansing is a mess. Salt Lake is a total write-off, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
He ran back to the helicopter. Once there, Eric turned his attention from the copilot and began to talk to Reynolds and it was obvious that the pilot was having trouble getting away. Jack finally called
Eric over and told him to relieve the guard outside the lab for a while. Reynolds grinned and gave Jack a thumbs-up behind Eric’s back before getting into the helicopter and taking off.
Once it was in the air again, Jack said, “Guess we’d better get ready for more survivors.”
~*~
A dozen survivors were brought in the next day, along with a large supply of bottled water, dried food and some badly needed medical supplies. Lindsey had volunteered to be on the welcoming committee since Doune didn’t need her help at the moment.
The new survivors were taken to quarantine, where they would stay for a few hours. Lieutenant Reynolds had assured Lindsey that all of them had been checked for bites and that those who had been bitten had already been separated from the rest. She hadn’t asked what had happened to them and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.
While the newcomers were in quarantine, Lindsey had them each fill out a questionnaire, providing some basic information including any skills and training they had that might be useful. She found living spaces for all of them, keeping families together in the larger rooms.
Many of the bikers preferred to sleep on cots in the ER waiting room or up on the fifth floor in the observation room that the snipers were using. For those that wanted something more private, patient rooms were becoming available. The mortality rate was high due to increasing power failures and a shortage of some necessary medications, but those who did recover were given jobs and assimilated into the community.
~*~
When Lt. Reynolds showed up the next day with more refugees, Lindsey noticed that he looked tired. He appeared to be a little frustrated when Eric once again walked over and began to talk to him. Reynolds excused himself after a moment and approached Lindsey. The bikers went back inside the building, dragging Eric along with them.
“I hope I wasn’t rude to your pilot, but he’s very persistent,” Reynolds said.
“We have a pilot?” Lindsey asked.
“Eric. He keeps telling me that he wants to ‘take the bird for a spin’ but I’ve explained to him that we can’t let him do that. He’s quite determined.”
Dead, but Not for Long Page 17