Rob pointed me towards an upstairs bathroom where I could change, at the end of the hall on the left, up the first flight of stairs. Like the rest of the house, it was recently renovated, or at least given a fresh coat of cerulean blue paint.
I stripped out of my scrub top, catching a whiff of my armpits as it went over my head. Last night I’d needed to catch some sleep, and this morning there hadn’t exactly been time to shower. I considered asking Rob if I could use his, but that’d open the doors for everyone else and I wasn’t sure he’d appreciate being put in that position.
Blood, an arterial wound, spurting like a fountain.
But there was a flannel, the water still ran hot, and I didn’t feel grabbing the soap from the shower would be overstepping my bounds as a houseguest. I’d put the flannel in the laundry basket afterwards though. It’s only polite.
Open mouths, screaming faces, spattered with red.
The warm water was enough to start chasing the chill out of my bones, and the prospect of there being tea, or even lifesaving coffee waiting for me downstairs, it was almost enough to make me start feeling human again. As I washed my face, I noticed the bruise around my eye wasn’t coming out as dark as I’d expected. That was something to be happy about.
They waited so patiently, and killed with a smile.
I was finished, and had started wringing the flannel out when I noticed my hands were trembling. That was odd. They weren’t supposed to do that.
You went into the night.
I stumbled to the bathroom door on weak knees, fumbling to make sure the lock was in place. The lights were too bright, the air was too thick, and I couldn’t swallow past the lump in my throat.
You should be dead.
‘Funny,’ I thought, watching myself go through the motions, ‘I’ve never had an anxiety attack before. I must have caught it off Claire.’
Naked, dizzy and numb, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and tried to catch my breath, barely getting more than shallow gasps. Burning tears began to run down my face, tracing hot lines before falling from my chin.
I watched myself, shaking and sniffing, and couldn’t do a thing. I knew that feeling detached from the situation was also a symptom, but this hadn’t happened to me before. I knew what I needed to do, but I didn’t know how to do it for myself.
Half of me was freaking out, and together with the half of me that had started crying, the half of me that was watching on helpless and the half of me that just wanted to just go home, it felt like there were rather too many versions of me trying to occupy the same space.
The room was spinning enough that I felt lying down and curling up on the bathmat was a good idea. It was certainly more comfortable, and I found myself sinking into that comfort to escape.
My fears for Kelly, Laurel and Dani. The thought that Emile, Lowe and Hale weren’t coming back from Overbridge. The simple fact that there were monsters out there wearing human faces. I put those thoughts as far away as I could, and embraced the deep, soft weave of the bathmat.
*
There was a polite knock on the door, and weak sunlight was coming through the frosted glass window. Groggily, I rolled over onto my back, and looked up at the ceiling.
‘Katy, are you okay?’ a voice asked. It didn’t sound like the first time they’d tried. ‘Do you want me to come in?’
It was taking me a moment to come around, but I was just about awake enough to realise it was Claire at the door. I’d locked it, in my paranoia, all the better to not let help arrive if I needed it. Stupid.
‘No, I’m fine Claire.’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I’ll be out in a few minutes.’
The need to relieve myself, suppressed by the horrors of the night, came back with a vengeance. I did what needed to be done, then set about trying to ground myself in the real Katy again. Just one of me this time, please.
It might not have made all that much sense, but I’d just woken up after an hour’s post-anxiety nap on a bathroom floor and wasn’t thinking all that clearly. It made me feel better and that’s what mattered.
My eyes were sore and bloodshot, but there was nothing I could do about that. I brushed, flossed, combed my increasingly floppy blonde hair into line and thought about trying to stand it up, but it was just getting past that length and besides, I didn’t bring any gel with me.
Then I set about returning my nose stud and various rings – ears and fingers – to their rightful places. Clean black underwear. Black shirt. Comfortable jeans. Big, clomping bike boots, trainers wrapped in plastic carriers and stowed in my kit bag. With last night’s flannel fished out the wash basket, I wiped the crud off my leathers, washed it out again as best I could, and threw it back in again.
Finally, I pinned my VHC identification to my jacket, just in case anyone forgot who I was. I’m not claiming to be a big deal or anything, but Claire had mistook me for a civilian when I’d been wearing scrubs under the leather. Now I was all-casual, I didn’t want people forgetting I was one of the medics.
Downstairs, Claire was sat at the dining table with a fully-dressed Rob and a weary looking Sergeant Bailey. The smashed patio doors had been covered over with old towels and tape, and the mess from the flowerpot had been cleaned up.
Coffee was present, and I was glad that nobody tried to talk to me until I had poured myself a cup, added sugar, milk, and breathed a sigh of relief.
‘You look like hell.’ Bailey told me.
‘I must be wearing my mirror shades.’
She smirked, looking down at her drink.
‘Were there any more of them?’ I asked her.
‘Been waiting for you,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘going to have a little meeting, when Dave gets here to speak for the cops.’
‘The others still not back?’
There was a round of shaking heads this time.
‘Are you okay?’ Claire asked.
‘Honestly?’ I sighed. ‘Not really. It’d be weird if any of us were, wouldn’t it? But I do think that I’ll be okay. Later. Probably. How about you?’ I asked, turning my attention around the table, one person after the other. It’d be good for us to talk about what happened.
‘They broke into me home.’ Rob said, his accent thickening with the weight of the words. ‘It brings everything closer. Having the ones you care about threatened like that. I wish my son wasn’t here, but if he hadn’t have been…I might not still be. That thing was right on top of me…’ he trailed off.
‘I’m sorry Rob, sorry we couldn’t have gotten there sooner.’
‘You made it quick enough.’ Rob smiled to her, though he was still tense around the eyes.
‘Seems a small worry by comparison. But I just want to sleep, in my own bed, in my own house.’ Bailey said.
‘That’s something I can fully sympathise with.’ I told her.
‘I’m scared.’ Claire put simply. ‘We’ve got wounded, and I don’t know if they’re going to turn into zombies or ghouls, or something we don’t even know about yet.’
Dave opened the front door, saw us sat at the table, and ducked his head in apology, closing the door behind him. He looked as tired as the rest of us, and as he pulled his chair out to sit, I saw dried blood in the creases of his fingers.
‘How are they?’ Bailey asked him. I didn’t know who she meant.
‘Not happy, but understanding.’ Dave answered, before whipping out his police notebook, and launching into his report.
‘We’ve got six known dead in total. The first to go was Jacob Anderson, we found his body hidden in the hedge. He’s the man who went for a piss and never came back. Then they got Detective Constable Noel Carmichael when he went out to look for Anderson. We figure that between Sergeant Bailey leaving the barn and your return, four or five ghouls slipped in and prepared an ambush.’
‘Who were the others?’ I asked, staring into the middle distance, trying to just let the news wash over me.
‘Besides Jacob and Noel, four more. One doctor by the name of Persephone Sc
hmidt-’
‘Oh no, really?’ Claire interrupted, her mouth open in surprise, ‘I had breakfast with her yesterday morning. Lovely woman, and a great surgeon. She had kids, back in Greenfield.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Dave stopped, pausing his report for a moment of silence.
‘I’m sorry about Carmichael too Dave.’ I said. ‘If I hadn’t have shone my torch down the side of that barn, he might have seen them coming, been able to defend himself.
‘Nah, bullshit.’ Dave said, waving his notebook dismissively, ‘We’re not playing that game. We know who’s to blame for last night, and it’s nobody sat in this room.’
I nodded in acknowledgement, but didn’t feel totally absolved. I’d have to practice better flashlight discipline in future, but I seized on the forgiveness and gestured for him to carry on.
‘With Doctor Schmidt, there was a Micha Korpal, and Henry and Millie Newman. They are survived by their daughter Sadie, age ten.’
‘Gods…’ Sergeant Bailey breathed. ‘That poor kid.’
‘We’ll look after her.’ Claire said, steel in her voice.
‘Besides the dead, we have four other civilians with eye-wounds,’ Dave continued, better to keep us moving through the report than letting us get hung up on things we can’t change. ‘Tony is amongst them, and without his co-operation, I think we’d have had problems with the rest. They’re in the groundskeeper’s lodge, waiting to see if anyone gets symptomatic.’
‘What happened to their eyes?’ I asked.
‘The ghouls scratched at them,’ Claire answered. ‘We saw to the surface injuries but we’re not sure if the wounds will result in infection, and if so, what kind. They could turn into zombies, or just come down with a serious case of conjunctivitis. We thought it best to keep them contained until we know what’s going on.’
‘How many people does that leave you?’ Rob asked.
‘SySec took no losses,’ Bailey answered, ‘ten of us remain on the farm, including myself. Like GFPD and the militia, we’re down four people on the Overbridge mission. I hope Captain Hale comes back in one piece. I don’t feel I’ve done a good job leading SySec so far…’ she added.
‘I’ve got two officers left here, plus myself,’ Dave answered, letting Bailey’s introspection slide, ‘but the militia aren’t sat on their arse. Eight of them, and they’ve split into two patrols with my guys. They’re skirting the perimeter while SySec keep an eye outside.’
‘Nine medical personnel left,’ Claire said, ‘with a total of twenty civilians to look after, plus four children. We’re now counting a couple of the older kids, fourteen, fifteen, as adults. They’ve offered to help with things if they can. Kids can be very mature when things are serious.’ She added with a brief smile.
‘We lose some people besides the ones the ghouls got then?’ I asked. ‘Those numbers don’t sound right.’
Dave hesitated a moment. ‘When I said we had six known dead, that’s because they were all we could identify.’
‘Coming back from searching the perimeter, we found evidence of…’ Bailey said, voice heavy.
‘I can relay this bit, if you want?’ Dave asked her.
She shook her head and cleared her throat.
‘They must have ran from the barn when everyone else did, but didn’t head towards the farmhouse. From what Claire says, some went for the gate and climbed over. Others went into the fields. Either the ghouls chased them down, or they ran into some other trouble. We found pieces of some of them. Blood. Fingers…fucking pieces but no bodies. No way to count how many were dragged off to Gods know where.’
‘This isn’t your fault Sergeant Bailey…’ I told her.
She scoffed.
‘Listen to Dave if you won’t listen to me. We know whose fault last night was. Those bastards out there.’ I pointed to the smashed patio doors. ‘We might have underestimated them, but we won’t make that mistake twice. Every time we face these things, we learn more about them, and can be better prepared for the next time.’
‘Learn from last night, don’t let it beat you,’ Rob said, reaching across to put his hand over Bailey’s.
‘You told me that Captain Hale knows what you’re capable of,’ I reminded her. ‘Why did he pick you to lead SySec in his absence if he didn’t think you were the right woman for the job?’
‘I don’t know what to do next.’ She said quietly. ‘I feel like the Captain would know, but I can’t think. I just keep coming back to it. Chasing our tails in the dark while people were dying back in the barn.’
‘We dropped the ball on that too,’ Dave said, ‘we didn’t know to plan for that kind of attack. Won’t happen again.’
‘Captain Hale told me that the key to success is to plan for everything…’ I said, nodding along with Dave.
‘That’s practically his motto.’ Bailey said.
Her eyes had been fixed to the table, but slowly, they tracked up, over to the smashed doors, covered and taped over, gently shifting in the wind from outside. She didn’t smile exactly, but the sour expression faded, turning into grim determination. It was as if she were waking up, the wheels in her head starting to turn.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked her. ‘We can’t just wait for the others to get back. We’ve got to be planning something, prepare for if they aren’t coming back.’
‘Then let’s get planning.’ Sergeant Bailey said as she reached for the coffee pot.
Twenty Eight
Sergeant Bailey took charge of the defences by following what she said was the very first play in the Sydow Security Private Military Company (SSPMC) strategy guide. You make your base not just easy to defend, but hard to attack. Apparently it was an important distinction.
She conscripted every able-bodied man, woman and teenager on the farm, both our group and Rob’s guests, leaving the children in the care of Lydia and Rob’s mother, the elderly lady with the crutch and revolver. She seemed a tough old gal, easily capable of whipping those inner-city kids into line.
While Lydia and Mrs Grant pressed the kids into kitchen duties, everyone else was free to assist Bailey with the enactment of what Dave called “Operation Turtle-Mode”; Bailey’s plan to fortify the farm against further attack, and respond to it better in the event we were caught with our pants down a second time.
Claire and I had our own assignments to get through before we would be free to assist, so I didn’t hang around for the briefing on the operation’s particulars.
The first thing we medics did was set up an infirmary in the snug. I’d suggested we might be better off for space by putting up one of Rob’s event marquees in the back garden or stables courtyard, but Sergeant Bailey said that in event of a full-scale attack, the farmhouse was the last fall-back point. If we had to retreat all the way there, we didn’t want to be dragging our wounded with us.
Made sense to me.
So the leather sofas were manhandled upstairs by strong-armed Gavin and Tucker, and everything was draped in paint-splattered dust sheets, covering everything from the carpets and coffee tables, to the fronts of the bookcases and media unit, with the assistance of some more of that strong tape that’d covered the patio doors. It wasn’t exactly sterile, but despite the well-used nature of the dust sheets, we were assured they’d recently been cleaned. It was the best we were going to get.
Rob also provided us with two folding tables that were sturdy enough to form an outdoor bar with all the trimmings, so would easily support the weight of a person. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but if we needed an operating table in the first place, the last thing the patient had to be concerned about was a sore back.
We pooled the resources from our packs to create a well-organised, reasonably well-equipped little trauma room. The most minor injuries we were expecting would be self-inflicted, cuts and bruises from people working on the defences. The worst, the stuff we really didn’t want to deal with, were amputations from bites.
But we were realistic.
We had a tub
full of rolled-up belts, right next to the bonesaw and another couple of belts we’d folded into a loop better for biting down on. If we had to cut into someone, there wouldn’t be time for anaesthetic. Just like the ebooklet said.
Once I had finished my bit, and the rest of the medics were running through their emergency procedures, Claire and I went for the second job on our list.
The potentially-infected had been isolated inside the groundskeeper’s lodge for about six or seven hours now. If they had been infected the conventional way, through a bite, then they’d have been beginning to show some early symptoms of infection – the wound would be itching and turning black from necrosis. We weren’t sure what’d be happening if they contracted it through an optical wound, which is why we had to keep an eye on them, so to speak.
There were two militia guards outside, standing idle with their rifles across their backs. There wasn’t actually anything to stop the people inside from opening the front door and trying to run away, except for guilt that they may be infected, and that they had nowhere to go even if they did.
‘Good morning Katy,’ Reg said as we approached. He was beginning to lose something of that senior accounting partner look, having acquired some particularly aggressive stubble overnight. With his neat moustache and glasses, it made him look odd.
‘Morning, Reg.’ I greeted. ‘Any news?’
He shook his head and we knocked on the door, Tony opening it for us a moment later. It wasn’t a particularly big lodge, so he didn’t have far to walk. He gestured for us to come inside.
I was surprised, but probably shouldn’t have been at this point, that it was recently renovated, and was more of a posh micro-home than just somewhere for a groundskeeper to sleep.
At the far end was a basic galley kitchen, running parallel to what must have been the walled-off bathroom. Above that was a sleeping area accessed via a steep set of stairs that doubled as a narrow bookcase. The front half of the building was taken up by a living area with one comfortable looking sofa and a TV on the wall.
Two people were sat on the sofa, another on the stairs, with Tony standing at the door. I was distracted by the TV for a moment, which was paused on a scene from a romantic comedy I recognised for its ability to make me break down and cry in a much nicer way than what happened last night.
The Suburban Dead (Book 2): Emergency Page 25