Outbreak (Book 1): Emerald City (29 page)

“Copy,” Williams said over the radio. “One of you stay on the roof. The other needs to get down here so we can all approach the garage together.”

“Shit,” Tanner complained.

“I can go,” Tasha said, knowing his ankle was not going to allow Tanner to move anywhere fast.

“Tasha,” he said. “You’re not --”

“Shut up,” she said. She was not about to argue with him about it. “I need you to show me how your machine gun works.”

CLARK

Clark watched the helicopter lift off from the top of the hospital with the survivors crammed inside and had a momentary feeling that maybe he should have forgotten about the documentation and found a seat on board.

“You ready to move?” Rocha asked.

“Damn straight,” Clark replied under his breath.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Clark said. “Following you.”

“Good,” Rocha said and jogged back toward the access door to the stairwell.

Earlier, after they had reached the roof with the survivors and were waiting for the helicopter to come in, Rocha had explained to Clark that this was the same roof he had landed on a few days before. “I can take you straight to the lab from here,” he said. “It was just one floor below where we found these guys.”

“Excellent,” Clark said. He was already sick of navigating the long dark halls of the hospital. All he wanted was to find the documentation as quickly as possible and catch the next ride back to the aircraft carrier so he could get to work on a cure.
And they better send back another damn helicopter
, he thought as he followed Rocha inside and down the stairwell. Clark was confident that if they could get a helicopter to come in and pick up survivors, then having what could be the key to winning the war against the virus would certainly warrant another ride.

Clark followed Rocha past the door where they had entered the stairwell originally and continued down one more flight of stairs. At the next floor, Rocha slowly opened the door and looked into the hallway. “Clear,” he said and crept out. Clark followed. The hallway was a mess of papers, hospital equipment, and decaying dead bodies. The smell was nearly unbearable. Clark put his sleeve up to his mouth, but still caught a strong whiff of the sweet odor of death and decay. He gagged and Rocha looked back at him. “You cool?” Rocha asked. Clark nodded and doing his best to ignore the horrors around him, he fell back into their routine of moving down the hallway with Rocha checking each opening to the left and right and Clark watching their backs. At the end of the hallway was a single door. “This is it,” Rocha said. “Your lab.”

Forgetting about the smell, Clark excitedly stepped past Rocha and placed his hand on the door knob. He hesitated, then slowly opened the door. It was pitch black inside so he stopped and listened. Movement. A lot of it and from the sound of shuffling feet, it sounded like infected. Clark jumped back and closed the door. He looked at Rocha. “I think there are infected inside.”

“Damn straight,” Rocha said. “Don’t worry about it. They’re all locked up.”

“What?”

“I said don’t worry about it. Just go on in.”

“Are you kidding me?” Clark asked.

Rocha pushed him toward the door. “It’s your party, bud. Get in there and check it out.”

“Jesus Christ,” Clark said. Using the nose of his pistol, he slowly pushed open the door. He crept inside when a security light suddenly came on and flooded the room. “Holy shit,” he barked and ducked down as if expecting an attack.

Rocha laughed. “Damn, man,” he said. “You’re acting like you never seen a lurker before. It's just a motion sensor.”

Clark was shaking all over. He did not think Rocha was funny but he let it go and looked around the lab. At the far end of the room there was a desk and chair, a dormant computer, a printer, some microscopes, and a large filing cabinet. There were also ten man-sized cages, two long rows of them which lined both walls and each with a single occupant. The infected in the cages were going ballistic at the arrival of Clark and Rocha.
Jesus,
Clark thought.
What the hell has been going on in here?

Clark looked in the first cage. It reminded him of a prison cell with a cot, a bucket, a jug of water and a bowl of what looked like dog food. The infected inside was growling and gnashing with what was left of its teeth. It clawed at the cage door and Clark knew that given the chance, the thing inside would literally eat him alive. He shuddered at the thought. “Any reason to keep these alive?” Clark asked.

“Not that I can think of,” Rocha replied. “But you’re the doctor. Your choice.”

Clark stared at the infected and tried to think of a reason not to put it out of its misery. He had nothing, so he brought his pistol up to head level and pulled the trigger.

Thwip!

The infected’s body sank to the floor of the cage as Clark checked the next three cages and repeated the same execution. One shot, one kill, just like Rocha always did. The last cage on the row was empty. “That's the one that had the normal guy in it,” Rocha said. Clark eagerly pulled the clipboard from its hook on that cage. He quickly scanned the documents on it but it was so loud in the room that he could not focus. The infected in the other five cages were slamming into the fenced doors.

“Rocha,” Clark said, trying to focus his attention on the clipboard. “Do you mind?”

Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!

“Thank you,” Clark said absently and flipped through the papers. If he was reading it right, the man had been in the cage for over a week. It was incredible. All studies had shown the infection turned its victims in twenty four to forty eight hours.

Rocha came over to read the paperwork over his shoulder. “That what you were looking for?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Clark replied and finished reading through the charts. It was everything he had hoped it would be. The man had been bitten and immediately began to show signs of infection. He was then placed into the cage for observation, but he never turned. After five days the records stopped and Clark wondered what had happened to the doctors and lab assistants who were monitoring him. Then he remembered the streaks of blood on the floor in the hallway and decided not to think about it anymore. He looked around at the tables and filing cabinets. There were papers everywhere, so he rifled through everything, looking for any reference to the patient. Coming up empty, he tried the filing cabinet, but it was locked.

“Hey,” he said to Rocha. “You got anything that can open this?”

Rocha took a multi-tool out of his pocket and handed his rifle to Clark. “Watch the door,” he said and went to work on the lock. Clark watched Rocha more than he watched the door and after a minute, Rocha was able to pry open the top drawer. He then broke the lock so all of the drawers opened. “All yours, Doc.”

Clark gave Rocha back his machine gun and started digging into the filing cabinets. The top drawer was a disorganized mess of haphazardly stuffed file folders that Clark flipped through. Disappointed with the mess, he slid the drawer closed and took a quick look through the bottom three. None of them were any better. “You are going to want to get comfortable,” he told Rocha and went back to the top drawer and started pulling out files. Rocha pulled the desk chair out and pushed it up against the door. Sitting down, he leaned back, closed his eyes, and immediately started to snore.

Unbelievable
, Clark thought and started to read. Fortunately, he immediately knew he was in the right place. His heart pounding with excitement, he saw what he had in his hands contained the key to saving the world. It may have been a disorganized mess, but there was an amazing amount of critical medical documentation, ranging from handwritten sticky notes to fully edited reports. It appeared the scientists at the hospital were so close to developing the cure that they had synthesized an antidote and were testing it on the infected in these cages. Clark got an empty feeling in his stomach as he looked at the corpses in the cages and thought he and Rocha probably should not have killed the rest of the test subjects.
Shit!
He thought.
Well, nothing can be done about that now.

As he continued to pull files out of the cabinet, Clark realized he was going to have too much documentation to carry out. It was a dilemma. He knew he could not take it all with him, but he did not want anything to happen to whatever he left behind. It was impossible to know what would happen to the hospital between now and when he could return. He thought of the irony of the situation. Up until the outbreak, paper records had become obsolete. Anyone could store millions of pages of documentation on a drive the size of his finger. But now computers were what was almost obsolete and he had to figure out a way to save a file cabinet worth of data. Knowing he had to be selective, he started sorting what he considered critical information and made stacks on the lab table. It dawned on him he would need something to carry the papers.

“Rocha!” he said.

Rocha kept his eyes closed. “Yes?” he asked.

“See if you can find me a backpack or something.”

“You got it,” Rocha replied and got up, peeked out the door, and then left.

Clark thought it was eerily quiet in the lab with just himself and nine dead bodies and felt a shiver roll up his spine.
Focus,
he thought, and got back to work sorting the documents. By the time Rocha came back with a red defibrillator box that was the size of a carry-on suitcase, Clark had enormous stacks of paper on the desktop. Clark looked at the box.

“It's the only thing I could find with shoulder straps,” Rocha said. “You need your hands free to shoot.”

Clark shrugged. He knew Rocha was right, but there was no way all of the papers that he had stacked would fit. He looked around, his eyes stopping on the printer, and had an idea. Most of the paper was printed, not handwritten. That meant at one time or another, the information had probably been on a computer. Hopefully the one right there in the lab. Or the hospital’s network, but that was a problem for a different day. If it was on the network, then he would send Rocha back later to get to the network server. If it was on the local computer’s hard drive, then he would take the hard drive and ignore all of pieces of paper that were from a printer.

“What’s up?” Rocha asked.

“Do me a favor and take the hard drive out of this computer.”

“I can do that,” Rocha said, pulling back out his multi-tool and getting to work. While that was going on, Clark sorted the documentation as quickly as he could and set aside only the handwritten pages. He was soon left with a stack of papers which would fit nicely into the defibrillator box. He opened the box on the lab table, took out the defibrillator and it’s accessories and tossed them under the table. He then filled the empty box with the documentation he wanted. Rocha made quick work of the computer and handed Clark the hard drive, which Clark put into the box with the rest of the notes. He closed it up, put it on his back, and tightened the shoulder straps.

“Perfect,” he said. He felt like a kid on Christmas and could hardly wait to get somewhere he could begin dissecting the data.

“You ready?” Rocha asked.

“Oh yeah,” Clark replied.

“Let's move then,” Rocha said. “We have a long hike ahead of us.”

“Whoa,” Clark said. “What? I thought we would just go up on the roof and catch a ride like the survivors.”

Rocha looked at Clark like he was an idiot. “Dude,” he said. “Where have you been? Survivors are priority Alpha. We are not. You want to get your notes back to Command, you have to carry them.”

Clark could not believe it.
Doesn’t anyone understand the importance of this documentation?
he thought. “These notes are going to save the world!” he said. “These records are more important than any of those survivors. We need to get these back to Command immediately. Every second counts!”

“Whatever, Doc,” Rocha said. “You want to get them back to Command? Then let's get a move on.” He went to the door, peeked out, and stepped into the hall, leaving Clark to do nothing but fume.

Unbelievable!
Clark thought. “Fine,” he said as he left the room and began to reluctantly follow Rocha back down the dark and bloodstained hallway.

LUKE

Luke went into a coughing fit. Deep, heavy chest coughs which sounded like something wet and ugly had taken up residence deep in his lungs. He remembered a few years ago, he had coughed like that for a week, in the good old days before the world had been overrun by the zombie apocalypse. He had thought at the time he must have had lung cancer because no one without some kind of fatal illness should ever have to cough like that. Back then, he decided he had to quit smoking so much because, while they normally made him feel better even under the worst circumstances, he was suddenly sure he was dying. He decided to reign in his smoking to only one pack a day. It had been hell. Cutting back had been nearly impossible, but he could not bring himself to go to the doctor, so he had suffered through it. Thankfully, a week later the cough had lightened up and he had gone back to burning his way through three packs a day.

Unfortunately, the way he was coughing now made that one week feel like a bad case of the sniffles. He was coughing so hard he thought he would break his ribs or pass out. Finally he was able to catch his breath so he hawked up the phlegm in his throat and spit onto the floor of the garage. He recoiled at the sight of the wad of dark red blood.
Did that just come out of me?
he thought. He pulled the pack of smokes stuffed in his pocket and crushed them in one hand before he threw them at the back wall of the garage.

About time I stopped that shit,
Luke thought and took another quick glance at the clot of blood on the floor. He decided to pretend it was there all along.
Maybe that isn’t really blood
.
I must have just spit into a spot of oil
, he decided and went back to work connecting the hand pump to the barrel of fuel. He was trying to extract the gas from the fuel drum and run it into the tank of the bank truck. He had been trying to do this for the last hour. The problem was he could not get the pump to hold fast to the rim of the drum. It did not help that his head had begun to hurt and his vision in one eye had gone blurry.
What the hell is wrong with me?
he wondered and peeked at the spot of blood on the floor again.

“Hey!” Matt called from the front of the bank truck. “Come hold these two wires together again.”

Eat shit and die,
Luke thought, but he put the hand pump on its side on top of the drum and went over to the driver’s side of the bank truck. Matt had to completely tear apart the vehicle's ignition to get to the wiring underneath. After he had finally figured out which wires were which, he had gotten the engine to catch, but it would not start. Matt didn’t know if it was because the truck was out of gas, if the battery was dead, or what, so they had hooked the generator up to the battery connectors and saw the fuel gauge showed empty. That was when Matt put Luke on the duty of filling the tank. Unfortunately, Matt had then promptly fallen into the habit of changing what he wanted Luke to do every two minutes. It was starting to really piss Luke off, to the point he had considered going out to the tow truck and getting his shotgun. That way if Matt kept ordering him around, he would just blow the sorry piece of shit into the same corner he had shot the hermit. Luke’s mood was not helped when he imagined Ted and Pete were probably over at the ambush site picking their asses, torturing zombies, or God only knew what else.

“Let’s go!” Matt yelled.

I am so getting my shotgun,
Luke thought. Instead, he climbed into the driver’s seat and bent over so that he could hold the two ignition wires. Bending over hurt his head, so he squeezed his eyes closed and wondered if any of the cigarettes survived being crushed in the pack he had just thrown against the wall. “Ready when you are,” he wheezed.

“What?” Matt yelled.

Luke coughed and worked to clear his swollen throat. He raised the volume of his voice so Matt could hear him from under the hood. “Ready when you are!” he screamed.

“Go for it,” Matt replied and Luke opened his eyes so he could see enough to touch the two wires together. He got a spark and could hear the truck engine try to turn over. Luke twisted the two wires together so they would not separate on their own and sat up. He pushed down the gas pedal with his foot and the engine continued to crank. He kept his foot on the gas, but the truck would not start and the garage quickly began to smell like gasoline.

“Shit!” Matt yelled from under the hood. “Stop! That’s enough! You’re flooding the damn thing.”

Luke let off the gas and pulled the two wires apart. He leaned forward, closed his eyes again and held onto the steering wheel with both hands. He wished he had not crushed his smokes. Matt walked over. “Hey, it’s not naptime,” he said.

Yep, gonna shoot him,
Luke thought but opened his eyes and looked at Matt. “Let me try to get some more gas into the tank,” he said.

“You do that,” Matt said and turned and threw a crescent wrench the length of the garage where it clanked against the far wall. “Shit!” he complained. He stomped around in a circle, punched at the air, and then walked over to pick up his wrench. “I’m going to pull the starter from the tow truck.”

Whatever
, Luke thought and slowly lowered himself out of the truck. He walked over and picked up his crushed pack of smokes and fished a cigarette out of the package. It was bent and smashed but he patted it back together and stuck it in his mouth. He went to the back door of the garage and opened it as he lit his crooked cigarette.
That’s better,
he thought. Suddenly, he felt another coughing fit coming on, so he sucked down the cigarette as fast as he could and got through it without having to stop and choke.
Maybe these are helping,
he thought. He fished out the second best cigarette from the pack and smoked that one too.

“Hey!” Matt yelled from the front of the tow truck. “You just going to stand around? Let’s get this done!”

Luke grit his teeth but dropped what was left of his cigarette onto the ground, smashed it with his boot and went back to the fuel drum to try to figure out how to get the stupid hand pump to work. Luke was not sure he had even set it up correctly. He had never used a hand pump like this before and his headache plus the sudden tightness in his chest made it hard to concentrate.
It has something to do with leverage
, he thought and looked at the setup again. He knew if he had one part of the pump through the pour hole and the body of the pump braced against the lip of the rim, then he should be able to run the hose from the drum to the truck and just stand there and pump the handle. The problem was the pump body would not stay on the damn rim! Every time he thought he had it right, he would try the pump and the whole thing would slip off and pour whatever gas was in the hose onto the floor.
The whole thing is a piece of shit anyhow. Made from some kind of cheap-ass plastic!
he thought. Plus the hose was about half the length of what Luke thought it needed to be to actually be useful.

Luke reached for another cigarette, put it in his mouth and then looked at all the gasoline around him on the floor.
Maybe not the best idea,
he thought.
What I really need to do is find a stash of chewing tobacco
. He figured it would probably also help with his cough, which he suddenly noticed had gone away, though now he felt his stomach start to churn.
Nope, going to ignore that
, Luke thought and decided to give the hand pump another try. He slipped the hose into the drum and ran the long end into the truck tank. He secured the pump body to the lip of the barrel and slowly worked the handle. Fuel gushed through the hose and Luke thought it sounded like it was working.
Going slow must be the trick
, he thought and kept working the pump. After five repetitions his shoulder cramped and his arm began to get tired. He had absolutely no energy. He knew he could not keep going much longer, so he tried going a bit faster. After a single hard repetition, the pump slipped off of the rim of the fuel barrel and fell onto the floor where the plastic handle snapped off.

“Goddamn-holy-son-of-a-bitch!” Luke screamed and kicked the worthless piece of shit hand pump across the floor where it skidded into one of the service pits.

“What the hell is your problem?” Matt asked from where he stood holding the tow truck’s starter. “What did you go and break that for?”

“Eat shit, Matt!” Luke screamed. He felt horrible and the last thing he needed was to take a bunch of crap from anyone.

“Watch your tone,” Matt growled.

“Or what?” Luke yelled so loud and hard that bloody spit flew from his mouth.

Matt’s face scrunched up and he tossed the truck starter at the bank truck where it landed under the open hood with a crash. “I’ve got a headache like you wouldn’t believe,” Matt said as he stormed at Luke. “So if you think I’m in the mood to put up with your shit, you're wrong.”

Luke could not believe Matt threw their only good starter at the truck like that. “You stupid asshole!” he yelled and pointed at the bank truck. “Are you trying to keep us here forever?”

“Put your hands up,” Matt said coming at Luke.

“Or what!” Luke yelled again.

“Or I’m going to kick your ass!” Matt said and threw a looping right, punching Luke on the side of the head. Luke felt like he had been hit with a brick and his head exploded in pain. Blood gushed from his ear and he stumbled backward and into the fuel barrel. He smacked the drum with his hip and tripped over his own feet. Only because he caught the workbench at the back of the garage on the way down did he keep his feet at all. He looked up as Matt came in for another shot. Luke saw it coming and ducked. Matt’s haymaker of a punch went over his head and Luke lashed out with his own right hand and caught Matt square in the nuts.

“Oh my God!” Matt squealed and cupped his genitals with both hands as he fell down onto the floor and curled up into the fetal position. “You dirty bastard!”

Luke stood over him and pointed at Matt with his finger. “Never lay your hands on me again!” he yelled and felt a wave of nausea wash over him. A huge pain blossomed in his chest and he was sure his heart had stopped. Crazily, he felt his neck for his pulse.
Nothing? Wait, my fingers are numb too!
he thought.
What the hell is happening to me?

He stumbled through one of the open bay doors and outside. He stopped and stared at the horde of zombies standing against the fence.  
What in the hell?  How … where? I’m hallucinating,
he decided and hobbled toward the tow truck. He was surprised by how much the wind had picked up and he smelled rain in the air. He looked up and stared at the wall of black clouds storming in from the coast.
Not good. Zombies are going to go ape shit when that weather hits.
Luke reached the tow truck and pulled his backpack out from behind the seat. He could not remember for sure if he had the rest of his smokes in there or not. He was having trouble thinking straight. Looking inside, he was elated to find the cigarettes were in there. He picked up his shotgun and ignored the zombies at the fence. As he went back to the garage, he planned on opening all the packs at once and then chain smoking until he died or felt better. He did not care anymore. He knew that something was seriously wrong with him and he was pretty sure it was more than just a hangover.

When he got back into the garage he saw Matt crawling into the back of the bank truck with his .44 magnum in one hand and the other still around his nuts.
I’m fine with that. Son of a bitch wants to be alone, I get it. I don’t want to look at his ugly face right now either.
Luke went to the far end of the garage and climbed slowly up onto one of the work benches. He looked out the bay door at the zombies, took out his lighter, and opened his first pack of cigarettes.
To my health
, he thought and lit up.