Dead City - 01 (15 page)

I caught bits and pieces of conversations as I walked through the crowd. People were complaining about the cold, about how hungry they were, about how scared and worried they were.

I didn’t blame them. Most of them were echoing the same feelings I had, and again I thought of April and Andrew, wondering if maybe they had left our home for someplace like this. Thinking of them made it hard for me to say anything reassuring to the folks who asked me when they could expect to be rescued.

I lied as best I could. I told them not to worry, that they were safe, that there was no way the military would take one minute longer than they had to before coming to our rescue.

If they knew I had doubts of my own, they didn’t let on. Most just walked away, wide eyed and still very frightened, mumbling to themselves.

From somewhere behind me I could hear Marcus laying it on thick with Sandy, and she couldn’t get enough of it. Once, I even heard her giggle, a bubbly, nasally sound that seemed totally out of place amid the stunned survivors around us.

I separated myself from the crowd and walked down a hallway that led back into the church, looking for a bathroom. I had mud and blood and bits of other stuff all over me, and after listening to Stiles talk about level 4 killer viruses, I had a renewed desire to get cleaned up.

The hallway went about fifty feet into darkness, past a number of offices and classrooms with locked doors, then opened into a high-ceilinged vestibule.

It was even darker there, and I turned on my flashlight.

Two other hallways went off to my right, and there was a flight of stairs on my left. A sign next to one of the hallways said RESTROOMS, and there was an arrow beneath it.

I followed the arrow.

The bathroom was a few doors down on the right, and I almost made it. I had my hand on the door when I heard somebody coughing, a mean, wet hacking sound that reminded me of the noises Carlos had made before his end had come.

I clicked off my flashlight and stood perfectly still, listening in the dark.

The coughing came again, and so did other noises. Worried voices. Calming voices. More coughing. A woman making a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream.

I drew my gun and inched along the wall, following the sound. Around the next corner I saw flickering yellow candlelight. The voices were clearer now, and so were the sounds of people in pain.

Slowly, I walked around the corner, into the candlelit main entrance to the church, and I gasped.

The entranceway was rectangular in shape, long and narrow, with a high, three-story ceiling. A massive wooden chandelier hung in the middle of the room. A narrow balcony ran the length of the room on both sides, and looked to go off to the upstairs levels of the main sanctuary, which was off to my right.

About thirty people were stretched out on makeshift cots, and all of them looked in really bad shape.

A couple of people who looked to be nurses were busy tending to the sick, trying to make them as comfortable as possible.

None of the injured seemed to have turned—yet.

Three things went through my mind all at once.

First was that Dr. Stiles must be using this place as some sort of hospital for the infected among his group. I remembered what he had told Sandy about a less than 100 percent mortality rate, and how he hoped at least some of the infected might recover, and a shudder ran through me. These people, I gathered, were relatives of those farther back, in the gymnasium.

My second thought was that Dr. Stiles had conveniently not mentioned his little hospital to Sandy or to Marcus and me. I shuddered again. What possible reason could he have for not mentioning it, I wondered. And then I answered my own question. He probably figured it would hurt his chances of being rescued if the rescuers knew this little virus bomb of a menagerie existed. Why would they risk spreading the infection, or catching it themselves?

My third thought had nothing to do with the sick people groaning on the floor, or even with the unscrupulous Dr. Stiles. It was all about the four men with rifles that had stepped out of the shadows on either side of me as soon as I entered the room. All four of them shifted their guns to their shoulders and, before I knew it, I was looking down the barrels of each of them.

I hadn’t noticed them at first. I was too busy watching a pair of nurses who were tending to the sick, and trying not to look into the red, swollen eyes of the few people on the cots who had strength enough to look at me.

The gunman closest to me looked about thirty years old. He had a golden complexion and deep black, unruly collar-length hair. He had a narrow build, and between that and the hair, he reminded me of some sort of Colombian soccer star.

But he was an amateur with the gun. He held the stock too high up, so that he had to point the barrel down at me in an uncomfortable-looking angle.

Untrained, no question. And twitchy, jumpy. A bad combination.

Behind him was a short, gray-haired man with a considerable paunch. He looked like he had fired a rifle before, but he was nervous, like pointing a gun at a cop was something he never imagined himself doing as long as he lived.

The other two guys, who were standing off to my left, were nondescript. Just regular-looking guys of average height and average build. They held their guns loosely, uncomfortably.

I focused on Twitchy.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“We don’t want you here,” he shot back quickly, angrily.

“Fair enough,” I said. I kept my voice calm, my moves slow and minimal. The last thing I wanted to do was get Twitchy twitchier.

“Leave us alone.”

“I’d like nothing better,” I said. “Let’s just put those guns down, okay? I don’t want to be here any more than you guys want me here. Just put your guns down and I’ll turn around and leave you to your business.”

There was an awkward pause.

Paunchy lowered his gun, almost dropped it. The two on my left did the same thing. It was like I thought with them. They didn’t want any part in this.

Twitchy didn’t drop his, though. He saw the others lose a little of their conviction, and it scared him.

Suddenly he was animated, his voice quivering with nerves. He stabbed the air with his rifle and spoke frantically, so frantically I could barely understand him.

“No, you put your gun away. Not me, no. Yours. Yours. Put it down first. You go first. Kevin, Robbie, watch him. Don’t let him talk you down. He puts his gun down first. Burns, get up here.”

He nodded at Paunchy behind him without ever taking his eyes off me.

“Burns, get up and take that gun from him.”

“Malin,” said Paunchy. “I don’t—”

“Nobody’s taking anybody’s gun away,” I said. “Everybody just stay cool. I’m backing up now. Just relax and everybody’s gonna be just fine.”

“No,” shouted Twitchy.

He said something to Paunchy that I didn’t catch. I was too busy watching the room behind him. Out of the corner of my eye I had seen movement under a sheet covering a cot, and as I watched, I saw a woman with a blood-stained face, blackened gore in her hair, and milk-white pupils, sit up in bed.

Her head turned slowly in our direction, the eyes dead.

Twitchy and Paunchy were still arguing about taking my gun. Without looking at them, I said, “Behind you.”

“Shut up,” Twitchy said.

“Right there,” I said, nodding at the woman getting out of the cot. “Shoot her.”

That was the wrong thing to say in front of Twitchy. I had meant to say something diplomatic, something calm, but even as I was thinking what to say, the words “Shoot her” just came out.

Twitchy exploded in anger. He took a couple of steps forward and shook his fist at me.

I saw a well-worn band of gold around the third finger of his left hand.

“You leave her alone,” he yelled. “God help me, I’ll kill you if you touch her.

Tears were streaming down his face, fat and round.

“That’s fine,” I said. The zombie that had been his wife was now lumbering at him. Paunchy had seen her in time and was backing away. “That’s fine,” I said again. “Take my handcuffs. Secure her to the cot if you need to. She can stay there till someone can help her.”

The zombie was five feet from him. Three feet. Too close.

“Malin,” Paunchy said. He was pleading with the man.

The zombie grabbed Twitchy by the shoulder and dug into the bare flesh of his arm with her teeth.

He let out a girlish squeal and yanked his arm away. The next minute he was pushing the zombie away, trying to speak to it like it was still his wife, trying to coax it back to the cot.

The zombie fought for another bite, and when Twitchy finally realized he couldn’t talk her back to the cot, he called for Paunchy to help him.

Paunchy dropped his gun and ran to help. Together they dragged the zombie back to the cot and forced her onto her back.

I took out my cuffs and walked toward them.

“Here,” I said, holding them out to them. “Take these.”

Twitchy wheeled on me, gun in the air. He fired a shot that whistled somewhere over my shoulder and hit the wall behind me.

“Stay away from her, you son of a bitch. Get back!”

I was frozen for a second, the shot still ringing in my ears. The cuffs fell to the floor.

Everybody in the room was looking at us. The two men with rifles off to my left were fidgeting nervously, still uncertain what to do. Both nurses were standing in the middle of the room, their feet rooted to the floor. A few pairs of miserable, blood-red eyes peered up from nearby cots.

Only Paunchy seemed to be focused on something other than the two of us. He was still struggling to keep Twitchy’s wife from getting off the cot.

Two more zombies sat up in their cots. A moment later, another one.

They lumbered to their feet, their bloody blankets falling down to the floor. One of them was closing in on the nurses. I yelled for them to move, but not in time. A zombie fell on one of the nurses, grabbed her by the hair, and pulled her to the floor.

She went down screaming.

Instinctively, I made a move to help her, and that set Twitchy into hysterics.

He fired at me.

The first shot missed me, went past me, and grazed one of the men on my left, striking him in the arm. The second shot thudded into the wall.

Twitchy didn’t stop firing. Each time he pulled the trigger, he stabbed the rifle at me like there was a bayonet attached to it, which was lucky for me. It kept him from aiming. All he was doing was spraying and praying, which sounds like a good way to manage a gunfight, but isn’t.

I ran to my left, clamoring over the injured in their cots, knocking them to the floor while I hit my belly and crawled behind a pillar for cover.

Twitchy was yelling and shooting wildly. I peered around the edge of the pillar and Twitchy fired again, forcing me back behind cover.

All I could see of the direction I’d come from were the three cots I’d knocked over, and the people who were now on the floor, holding their stomachs and vomiting a black, tarry goo onto the wooden floor.

The man closest to me was staring me right in the face when he slipped under and became a zombie. It occurred to me then that he must have been using all his strength to stave off the change, and I had pushed him over the edge, or distracted him, which amounted to the same thing. Either way, by upsetting his cot, I had broken his concentration, and now a zombie was staring me in the face.

The other two behind him changed in the same way. It was like watching a row of lightbulbs flicker out. One minute they were human, suffering. The who of what they were, or had been, was gone, leaving only an angry blank slate.

The three zombies stood up, and then the whole room erupted in screams and the clanging of beds being overturned and bodies colliding.

Over the din of it all, I could still hear Twitchy yelling at me. Despite everything going on around us, he seemed to have focused on me, treating me like the root of all his troubles.

He fired two more shots. One of them hit the floor next to my left hand and kicked up little pieces of wood that peppered my arm, burning like wasp bites.

I ran for the next pillar, not giving him the chance to close in on me. As I landed on the ground behind the next pillar, I turned, raised my gun, and almost fired.

I didn’t pull the trigger, though, because just then Marcus broke into the room right behind Twitchy. Dozens of people ran into the room behind him, Sandy and Stiles and the two cameramen among them.

Sandy gasped. Stiles’s face was lit with rage. There was a mad rush of people as Stiles and a few others tried to take the cameras away and pull Sandy from the room. At the same time, people continued to rush into the room, running to the cots in the room to check on their injured friends and family.

Twitchy wheeled around and pointed his rifle at Marcus.

Wrong thing to do.

Marcus grabbed the barrel in his left hand and pushed it away. He dug the heel of his right hand under Twitchy’s chin and forced his face to the ceiling. Then he kicked him in the balls so hard that Twitchy’s feet actually left the floor.

Twitchy collapsed, gurgling in pain.

Marcus turned on Stiles and snarled something at him. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I gathered it was something similar to what I had said to myself when I first saw the room.

People were screaming, fighting, dying. We were packed in so close together that it was hard to tell the healthy from the sick.

I couldn’t shoot my way out. The room was too crowded for that. Instead, I kicked and punched my way to the front door. I thought if I could only make it out the doors, and put some distance between myself and this crowd, I’d stand a chance of making it back to the car.

I fought my way to the doors and pushed on them, but they were locked. When I turned back to the room, I could see people getting knocked down and devoured. Arms were waving, faces bent into horrible masks of rage and pain, and in the middle of it all was Marcus, swinging the butt of the rifle around like a club, tearing a path through the crowd.