I cursed, giving the doors a little kick to work off my frustration.
‘There’s another way around, but they’ll be long gone before we get there,’ Grey said, giving the doors a shove himself, just to confirm.
Emile however, hadn’t given the doors a second look. His torch beam was pointing down at the floor, where a set of bloody prints marred the linoleum – and I don’t mean boot prints. These feet were bare when they walked through blood, and judging by the faintness of the prints, the blood was some ways from here.
Breathing a little heavier from the sudden run, Emile crouched down and touched one of the prints with a finger.
‘Dry. Probably here when you first saw the body.’ He said, wiping his fingers on his trousers.
Grey produced a pocket sized bottle of antibacterial gel from his white coat and passed it to Emile. ‘Be careful with the blood. Why would someone take their shoes off down here?’
‘Have you heard the noise we’ve been making? They would be quieter, able to sneak around without anyone hearing their shoes. But why?’ he asked.
A thought occurred. ‘Maintenance is down here, power and light. If they wanted to sabotage the hospital, all they’d have to do is flip a switch.’
‘You on board with my “cruel hand” theory now?’ Emile asked, with a trace of amusement.
‘No, your grandfather is just nuts.’ I quipped back, trying to ease the tension.
‘It wouldn’t be so easy to sabotage the power,’ Grey stepped in, ‘someone wouldn’t be able to just wander in and disable the hospital as easy as that. There’s security in place, heightened, at the moment, a group of soldiers are stationed down here.’
‘Let’s go have a talk with them. You know where the power room is?’ Emile asked.
Grey nodded, and for the first few steps, led the way. When he realised we were still down in the abyssal blackness of the basement, he took a step back, and made an awkward “after you” sort of gesture to Emile.
As we retraced our steps, I saw more of the bloody footprints in Grey’s light. Sure enough, it looked like we were following them towards the power room, and they were going from faint marks to clear outlines. But at the intersection where we’d turn towards maintenance, we heard a noise in the dark.
Ragged, wheezing breathing.
I froze in my tracks, almost bumping into Emile who’d done the same. I’d heard breathing like that enough today, but this was much worse than the common infected. An aberration perhaps?
‘Dios mío, it lives...’ Emile muttered, his light falling upon the infected he’d shot.
It wasn’t an aberration. But it was wounded – an injury that would have killed a human being outright. In the brief moment before Emile moved his light away, I could see the shotgun blast had torn through its chest and most likely severed the spine. Bubbling lungs were still desperately trying to fill with air, either to moan or to scream. They didn’t need oxygen for their bloodstream, not without a heart.
‘Gods, Emile. Finish it off.’ I urged him.
‘I did not believe…that they were so…’ he muttered to himself, almost in awe, ‘so hard to kill. They said you shoot them enough and they die. I am not so sure now.’
In the limited engagements Sydow Sec and the Territorial Army would have had with the infected, they’d have been aiming for centre-mass, like Dr Lines said. People are trained to shoot for the torso, it’s easier to hit than the head, and against a living person, almost as lethal – generally enough to take someone out of the fight, at least.
‘Please, officer,’ Grey begged, ‘put the poor sod out of his misery.’
‘Cover your ears.’ Emile said, finding his resolve, his voice going stiff again.
The shotgun blast was less deafening with the warning. I didn’t look to see where Emile had shot to finish the damn thing off, but I had a pretty good idea, and was glad Grey wasn’t shining his light on it to find out either.
I left my extinguisher on the ground, my arms getting tired from holding the clumsy improvised weapon. Now the threat was eliminated, I felt somewhat safer.
We carried on following the footprints to the doors of the maintenance area, double-wide like most of the doors down here, but with a security keypad for typing in passage, or swiping your identification card. We wouldn’t need to bother with that however, as someone had smashed the security glass window, torn out the wire mesh, and operated the lock from the other side.
‘How the hell?’ I asked, as Emile inspected the damage.
‘I’ve seen things like this before,’ he shrugged, ‘a large hammer, a few minutes of brute force. Our speedy friend came down here with a goal in mind.’
‘Didn’t look like he was carrying anything though…’ I said to Grey, half questioning. He shook his head.
Emile nudged the doors open with his shotgun, revealing a bare concrete corridor beyond. It was nearly as wide as the thoroughfares we’d just been running down, but for the lack of lino and paint, seemed more like the passages of an ancient tomb.
But at least it was lit. Sort of. Emergency lights shone with a vaguely greenish tint, having kicked in when main power failed – or was shut down.
‘Why have these lights triggered, but the others did not?’ Emile asked Grey.
‘I’m a doctor, not an electrician.’ He replied with a shrug.
The footprints began to grow even more bloodied as we entered the concrete passages, ignoring the signs for the laundry and chemical store, heading straight for the power room. As we rounded a corner, the bloody mess was hard to miss.
Arcs of arterial spray covered the walls, floor and ceiling, with a pool soaking into the concrete flooring. The soldier I’d seen in the corridor had his throat torn open – quite deeply, judging by the scene before us, though with the amount of blood on show, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out two or three men had died here.
Emile turned away to gather himself, but Grey and I had the steely stomachs of physicians. Even so…there was something wrong about all this blood that I couldn’t put my finger on.
I pushed the thought aside for a moment. ‘So this is where he was killed.’
‘Then whoever that was…they must have dragged the body, so nobody would find it?’ Grey tried.
‘Who would look for a body down here?’ Emile replied, joining us in staring at the mess – though in his case, I imagine it was more like examining the crime scene. ‘This is more hidden, out there is a passage where people would walk. You would leave the body here. Also…’ he trailed off, squinting.
‘Also?’ I prompted him.
‘Where are the drag marks? Blood enough to leave a long trail of footprints. But not to drag?’
‘The body walked away.’ Grey said, his voice hollow.
‘No, it can’t have,’ I shook my head, ‘that solider in the corridor was dead. If he was infected, it’d take hours for him to go from dying on the ground here to walking himself out. Besides, they can’t play dead, he’d have just been trying to eat me the moment he saw me.’
‘Something is going on here.’ Emile said, vague words but with the air of one saying something more urgent. ‘We need to get the power back on. It has been maybe fifteen minutes since the lights went out. That is a lot of time for people to do something stupid.’
‘At least we haven’t heard any gunfire.’ Grey said.
‘No shotguns, or rifles at least,’ Emile nodded to him, ‘but the handguns of scared civilians? We may not hear them through the floor.’ He said, looking up at the ceiling.
‘Sooner we get the lights back on, the better.’ I urged them on, the three of us setting off again along the concrete passage. We had to step through the blood, some of it drying and coagulating at the edges, but by treading carefully we managed to get through without creating many more footprints.
‘This much blood…only just beginning to dry…’ Grey though aloud, speaking to no one in particular, ‘it’s been here more than thirty minutes, less
than an hour. If their intention was to cause panic, why wait so long from killing the guards, to enacting the plan?’
The door to the power room was open.
‘Wait here.’ Emile whispered, before taking off ahead of us, using that quiet, rolling-step technique again, shotgun raised to his shoulder.
He disappeared into the room, and I was left with Grey in the bloodied corridor. He’d switched his flashlight off, given that the emergency lights were enough to see by, but he still kept fidgeting with it. To be fair, I wish I had a big heavy comfort blanket too. I was starting to regret setting down my fire extinguisher.
‘It’s clear.’ Emile called out. We rushed forwards, in that awkward jog of one trying to be quick but where the distance is too short to run.
The power room was a large grey concrete box full of equally grey metal boxes. It was lit with the same pale green emergency lighting from bulbs on the wall, just enough to cast ominous shadows from the several steel cabinets which stood with their doors open, breaker switches flipped to the off position. They were arranged in two rows towards the back of the room, with a flat-pack style corner desk at the front given over to a small security station.
Judging by the lack of nearby snacks and toilet facilities, I guessed Sydow Sec had set it up, rather than it being a permanent fixture down here. The dozen stacked TV units that should have been showing CCTV were all dark.
Grey began inspecting the cabinets, talking to himself.
‘They give you one day’s instruction, just in case, never need to use it, just because you work down here…’
‘You alright, Doctor Grey?’ Emile asked.
‘Just a moment!’ Grey called back from halfway down one of the cabinet aisles.
True to his word, a moment later, he began flicking switches, and monitors on the desk began blinking to life. Cameras, lights, action, the hospital was waking up from its unexpected nap. The generators whirred to life, filling the room with a dull hum that drown out the sounds from above. That’s when our eyes drifted to the monitors, and we saw the trouble had barely even started.
Nine
Emile was beside me, seeing what I was.
‘Is that live?’ he asked.
The feed on one monitor was from above the third floor nurse’s station, two semi-circles of built-in desks placed back to back in a square room – it was an intersection between wards and connecting corridors, a place for us to manage patients, direct visitors and base ourselves from for the day. Someone had barricaded it with filing cabinets and office furniture.
‘I think so…’ I sighed.
A mixture of wrist-tag wearing patients, and presumably their concerned family members, were securing the barricade. Through the window in the corridor entrance, I could see another figure was talking to them, but with no audio on the feed, I couldn’t be sure, and had no way of telling who they were.
‘Probably the protestors. Finally got in, and decided to do something stupid. Damn it – look at that one.’ I grimaced, pointing at a patient at the barricade. They were leaning on it for support, and their skin was turning a sickly, feverish pale. ‘Might be she’s not infected, could just have the flu. Or maybe we missed one during screening. That station’s vital though, they’re putting the whole hospital at risk, just by blocking if off, let alone trapping themselves in there with the infected.’
‘They think they are protecting their family, making sure they are not being mistreated.’ Emile said, giving his head the barest of shakes. ‘I am not defending them. But I understand them.’
‘They don’t have a fucking clue what’s really happening.’
‘No, they do not. But they are not responsible for what happened down here.’ Emile said, scanning the TV screens. ‘What did the person you saw look like? Did you see their face?’
Grey joined us at the desk. ‘They wore something over their head. A hood, a scarf, a wrap, something like that.’
Emile grunted acknowledgement, and pointed at a screen. ‘This corridor is not far from a stairway. Was it him?’
He pointed to a figure in a waiting area, one of several in a small mob by a nurse’s station desk. My colleagues looked to be fielding questions, trying to calm them down.
‘Too broad, the person we saw was slimmer, right?’ Grey asked me.
‘Yeah.’
Emile pointed to another monitor, another person, this one familiar. ‘She’s wearing a blanket on her head. Could it have been her?’
The old woman was in a wheelchair near a stairwell door, but was slowly making progress down the otherwise abandoned corridor. Likely everyone had ran by her in the panic, nobody stopping to help.
‘It’s a shawl. And no, I passed her in a corridor earlier, she’s like a hundred years old.’ I shook my head.
‘I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this,’ Grey sighed, gesturing at the monitors. ‘We’ll be better off getting upstairs and reporting what happened to the administrator, or the security services.’
Just then, there came a crackle from under the desk, a brief hissing of static that made us all jump back – Emile pointing his shotgun as if some rabid dog was to emerge.
‘Romero One, Romero One, do you copy? Over.’
Emile knelt down and reached beneath the desk, coming back with a walkie-talkie. He bleeped the button, and was about to speak, but moved it away from his ear again.
‘What if this belongs to the one responsible?’ he asked us.
‘Romero One, from Control, are you receiving? Urgent call. Over.’
‘I think it’s a Sydow Sec radio,’ I said. ‘They’ve all got one of those in the quarantine ward.’
‘And that black box on the desk, I recognise from my service days.’ Grey nodded. ‘Signal booster, so the radios will work down here now we’ve got the power back on.’
Emile nodded, and lifted the walkie up again.
‘Control this is Officer Asturias, GFPD. Define Papa Romero, over.’
‘Officer, Papa Romero is the team guarding the maintenance area. Are they available to speak? Over.’
‘Negative, Control. Evidence suggests your people are KIA. We have restored power and there is no trace of those responsible. How do we proceed? Over.’
There was a delay on the response. Long enough for the three of us to share a significant look before the radio crackled again.
‘Captain Hale is on his way, sit tight Officer. Thanks for the power. Should be able to calm things down now. Control out.’
Emile said nothing, but I’ve heard enough radio chatter to know you didn’t need to follow up if someone said “out”.
‘Nothing to do now but wait?’ Grey asked.
‘I really should be getting back upstairs.’ I said. ‘Dr Lines will want me back in his house of horrors.’
‘No, you should stay.’ Emile said, ‘SySec might want to take a statement from us, and it may still be dangerous out there. I think Dr Lines will understand.’
‘Fine, policeman’s orders.’ I tutted, folding my arms.
‘We can’t just sit here, twiddling our thumbs.’ Grey said.
‘Then we can watch the cameras.’ I suggested, ‘See if we can spot any trouble brewing before it happens. Warn people.’
We set about studying the screens, trying to find one that showed a hospital entrance. There had been a lot of people running about upstairs. Makes sense they’d be trying to find the way out. When I found what I was looking for, I drew Emile’s attention to it, and he cursed again.
‘Joder. Last thing we needed.’
The main entrance, where I’d entered the quarantine area, was rammed full of civilians on the ground floor, and the corridors that looked over it like balconies were similarly crowded with hospital staff and patients.
A combination of police officers and soldiers stood before the doors, weapons ready, but not aimed at the people. One of them, in a Sydow Sec uniform, was standing a little in front of the rest, his hands doing all the talking since we didn�
��t have sound on these things. He looked to be quelling a riot.
‘Control, Asturias. We have the CCTV back and may as well use it. Over.’
‘Received, Asturias. We have live feeds in the hospital security room, but no eyes to look at them now bar mine. Romero’s camera setup was backup in just such a case. What are you seeing? Over.’
‘Mob at the main doors you’ve got under control. But there is a group of people barricading themselves in on the third floor – that is our monitor number four, and a nurse’s station is facing some very angry people on nine. I also have an old grandmother on monitor ten struggling along in a chair, may need assistance, over.’
‘I can dispatch someone to check on the first two, but unless she’s in distress I can’t do much for the elderly patient. Keep calling them as you see them Officer. Control out.’
So we did. Grey kept an eye on the door while Emile and I played spotter and watched as the scenes in the hospital unfolded. I lost track of the lady in the wheelchair, but we saw a pair of soldiers come to quiet down the angry patients at the nurse’s station, saw the people dispersing from the main entrance, and generally watched the hospital putting itself back together over the course of the next hour.
The only persistent problem was the patients who’d locked themselves in on the third floor. From another camera we’d seen an officer from GFPD head up to talk to them, followed by the same Sydow Sec guy from the foyer, probably a bigwig of some kind. However, the bastards in there weren’t budging.
Emile’s police radio must not have been invited to the signal booster party, as he still couldn’t raise anyone from GFPD. Since they seemed to be working in lockstep with Sydow Sec anyway though, it was something of a moot point.
With the non-infected patients back in their rooms, the security stations and patrols back in place, and the riot police apparently maintaining order outside once more, the whole situation seemed to be settling down again. With one exception. We were still in the basement.
‘Control, Asturias. Do you have an ETA on our relief? Is the captain coming? Over.’
‘Affirmative Officer, apologies for the delay. Captain Hale was held up by some of the incidents we were seeing. Should be with you shortly. Control out.’
The Suburban Dead (Book 2): Emergency Page 8