Pestilence: The Infection Begins (6 page)

A
s Tilford reached
out to open the door to the consultation room, he hesitated. The grip of fear had a hold on his lungs and squeezed the air from him.

“Are you all right, Isaac?”

“Yeah, I just lost my breath for a sec—”

He opened the door to the consultation room and was confronted by a ghastly sight that caused him to lose more than just his breath. The coffee and doughnuts he’d had less than half an hour ago gushed from the pit of his stomach, up his throat and spurted out of his mouth like a broken fire hydrant.

“Oh my God!” Delaney staggered back against the frame of the door.

Before them, on the floor of the consultation room the naked woman with the blood-filled eyes sat astride the midriff of the nurse. Blood was smeared all over her mouth, ran down her chin to her neck and smeared around her tits—which Tilford found no longer enticing. The nurse lay crumpled on her back, a large chunk of skin torn from her neck. When Tilford entered, the blood-eyed woman was smearing the blood of the nurse all over her bare breasts. It was obvious by the blood around her mouth she had also dined on the nectar of life.

Ms. Enticing Tits snarled, like a wild animal caught in a cage; she didn’t like having her meal interrupted. She raised both her hands, fingers curled in angry claws. One of the locked doors to the observation/isolation room to the side was ajar. Whether the nurse opened it for some unexplained reason or her attacker did, no one knew nor cared at this stage. Grace Delaney now believed the calls she’d heard at the nurses’ station—of patients drinking the blood of their victims.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Delaney yelled. “COME ON, DOCTOR!” She grabbed Tilford’s arm, who was bent over and retching, and pulled him back through the door, slamming it shut behind. She knew that wouldn’t stop the blood-drinking fiend, but she might return to her feasting instead of following.

They heard muffled cries for help coming from some of the other consultation rooms as Delaney and Tilford ran back toward the nurses’ station.

“Intensive care, intensive care,” Beth Sanders screeched at Delaney when she arrived, “attacks have broken out in IC.”

“Gimme a phone,” Delaney said to the nurse. She had to tell Calgleef of the situation. Surely he couldn’t turn his back on them now.

“Hello? Hello, what… who is this?” she demanded when an officious-sounding clerk answered on the other end and asked for her name and the reason for her call. “What the fuck…”

She ended the call thinking it a wrong number and pushed the buttons for Calgleef’s direct number a second time. When the same clerk answered, Delaney dropped the phone by her side. She looked across the hallway at the men in the hazmat suits taping thick clear plastic over the windows, and she understood: all calls were now being monitored.

“Delaney, my name is Grace Delaney with the CDC,” she said cautiously into the phone, “and I’d like to speak with Director Calgleef.”

She made no mention of where she was. How many hospitals could there be that have been sealed off by the CDC and have their calls monitored by NSA, the CIA, the FBI or who-the-fuck knows?

“The nature of your call, ma’am?”

“Nature of my call? Are you fucking kidding me?” When she realized the calls were being monitored, Delaney thought some manners might help in obtaining her desired goal, which was to speak to Calgleef. But when the clerk asked for the nature of the call as if it was a call to the local county, she went ballistic.

“I need to speak with Calgleef, the vaccination recipients are attacking patients, we have a plague, a damn,” she paused to catch her breath, “pestilence has broken out and I need answers, damn you!”

“Hello, hello…” she repeated when the line appeared to go dead.

“Miss Delaney, how good of you to keep us up to date.” Calgleef continued to call her “Miss” instead of her medical title.

“Keep you up to date? You know damn well what’s going on here, or do you?” she snapped at him, her anger enough to catch the attention of the staff members nearby, until more calls for help from outpatients redirected their interest.

“I believe this batch of vaccines has been tampered with, Miss—” He started to spin yet another story but wasn’t allowed to finish. Delaney had had more than enough of his bullshit.

“Tampered with? You lying sack of shit, you have no idea what’s taking place in here, do you? You’re just doing what you’ve been told, right? Well, let me fill you in—the Baltic flu, or some super strain of it, has broken out in the outpatients who received a shot, and now they’re attacking staff of the hospital, biting chunks from their necks and drinking their blood… so there you go, Miss-ter Calgleef. Now you know exactly what’s going on in here!” She dragged his name out, then added, “Oh and now that your controllers have us sealed in, and you don’t have to worry about the profits being jeopardized from the sale of the vaccine. But of course you wouldn’t be part of that, would you?”

The return answer she got was the sound of Calgleef’s cell as it smashed against the wall.

Yep, the truth hurts. She made up the last bit about the controllers and the vaccine profits in her anger, but the response from the CDC director told her she had hit a nerve—a raw nerve.

Calgleef knew, Moya knew, obviously the pharmaceutical company and goodness knows who else also knew; to have access to government agencies and emergency services to cover their tracks, it had to be big: VERY, VERY BIG.

It would go without saying that if she knew, then they now knew she did, and there was no way they would let her out—not alive.

* * *

R
iverside Hospital consisted
of three floors and a basement all connected via elevators or stairs, with the basement and the roof of the building accessible only by keycard. ER was on the first floor along with outpatients, but on the opposite side an entry was also controlled by keycard.

It was these thoughts (patient safety rather than her own) that began to occupy Delaney’s mind as the minutes ticked by. She would like nothing more than to get her hands around that bastard Calgleef’s neck and squeeze the miserable life out of him, but there were a lot of patients in the hospital, and after what she and Tilford had just witnessed, that would make for a lot of meals for the infected.

“What did he say?” Tilford could tell by the frown on her face the phone call hadn’t provided any assurances.

“Not anything that’s going to help us. But believe me, he knows about this. He—”

“Oh my God! Oh my f-f-f—” A nurse at the station counter, frantically trying to call 911, jumped out of her seat and pointed toward IC, then collapsed.

A dark-haired orderly in blue scrubs staggered through the double doors from IC. Bent over with pain, his skin was a pale chalk-blue, and a pinkish liquid frothed from his mouth. He forced himself toward the counter at the nurses’ station. With the last of his strength, he stood up, revealing a mouth-sized hole on the side of his neck. Several teeth marks were also evident on his exposed skin.

“They, they…” The orderly pointed back to IC, but his eyes rolled into the back of his head, his knees wobbled and he collapsed, dead.

“Come on, we have to move!” Delaney told those present, and conscious, aware the longer they waited the more difficult it would be.

To escape.

“The patients, what about the patients?” Beth Sanders said as she backed away nervously from the counter.

“We don’t have time, Nurse, we have to get out before we’re next.” Delaney pointed to the pale blue corpse.

“She’s right, Beth, we’ve got to go.” Tilford backed up the doctor from the CDC. He was impressed by her medical acumen but more so by her ability to make logical decisions under these conditions, and she wasn’t bad on the eye for her age. “Let’s take the stairs to the second floor. We might be able to block it off.” He motioned toward the stairway to the side of the aisle behind the counter.

“Okay lead the way,” Delaney told Tilford, then directed Nurse Sanders to follow. “Come on, Nurse, we have no choice!”

“All right, all right, but what about Nurse Childs?”

Childs was the nurse who had collapsed on seeing the orderly stagger from IC. She was known throughout the hospital for her jovial personality and also a love of dough-nuts. She weighed in the vicinity of three hundred pounds, and along with Delaney, Tilford and Sanders, was the only staff member in the vicinity. Delaney took a hard look at Childs, then looked questioningly at Tilford. She was going to leave this decision to him.

“If we can’t rouse her, we won’t be able to carry her up the stairs,” Tilford had to be practical, their lives were at stake.

This was a tough decision, but it was made for them when three infected patients burst through the door from IC.

“Oh shit!”

“Exactly, Nurse, now let’s GO!” Delaney grabbed a handful of Sanders’s uniform and pulled her toward the stairs. The last vision she had was of the three blood-eyed ghouls as they descended upon the orderlies’ body. Delaney didn’t think that morsel would occupy them for long, considering that he looked to be drained of blood, but she thought the discovery of Nurse Childs would present a fine offering.

Sick. Sick. She shook her head to remove the heartless notion. It’s survival of the fittest now, survival of the fittest, she reminded herself.

They started up the steps when an authoritative voice called from behind.

Gerard.

“Wait, you there, wait for me. Do you—” Gerard called out to Delaney but stopped when he saw the three infected hunched over the orderly biting chunks of flesh from his body, then drawing the red liquid in. “Oh my fucking… what in the name of—”

The three infected stared at the hospital CEO, their eyes filled with blood, which was also smeared over their faces. Slowly they rose in one motion but remained bent over at the knees and hips, like a coiled snakes about to strike.

In a flash all three covered the distance between themselves and Gerard. The hospital CEO was thrown to the floor screaming and thrashing as the teeth of the infected punctured holes into any exposed flesh they could find. It was a terrifying sight for Delaney and Tilford. Nurse Sanders, already in the stairwell, was spared the horror. The ghoulish brutes felt no remorse or pity as they sucked blood from their victim while he cried for mercy, totally ignorant of his suffering. Gerard screamed until he lost consciousness.

“Now’s our chance to get the nurse!” Delaney whispered to the others. The visual before her was appalling and her instinct was to take flight, she hadn’t become so self-serving she lost sight of the chance to save her fellow human when she could.

Together, the three of them might be able to get it done while the ghouls were preoccupied with Gerard. “Let’s grab the nurse and get on our way before they notice us, or any more of the fuckers show up.” Delaney kept her voice low as she and Tilford crept stealthily toward Childs. Sanders stayed at the door to the stairway, ready to open it when they came back.

Tilford grabbed Childs by an arm and shook as hard as he could without making noise. The folds on her arms blubbered like bowls of Jell-O, but he didn’t dare utter a word for fear of attracting the three infected ghouls. Delaney got behind, leaned over and lightly shook the nurse’s head in an attempt to bring her around. Sanders kept a vigilant eye out, but when she saw the attempts from the two doctors weren’t getting anywhere, she took matters into her own hands as only a nurse can. She grabbed a bottle of water off the counter next to one of the computers, ripped the top off and poured it over the face of the unconscious nurse. Water splashed over Childs’s cheeks and ran into her eyes, but it did the job.

“Pffffppppp, pfffppp,” Childs spluttered.

“Shh!” Delaney placed a palm over Childs mouth, then pressed an index finger to her own lips.

“We have to move, Jenny, but be quiet, be very, very quiet, okay?” Sanders, holding the empty water bottle, whispered.

I’m hunting wabbits! An Elmer Fudd cartoon rushed into Delaney’s head when Sanders spoke. Strange the things thought of in times of stress.

T
ilford kept
a hold of Childs’s arm helping her up. Well, he tried. If she fell or resisted, it would be doubtful he’d be able to move her.

“Don’t look that way,” Delaney whispered to the nurse when she became more aware of her surroundings. “Up the stairs everyone, go straight up the stairs.”

None of them had any idea of what to expect on the second floor and more than one wondered why there hadn’t been any activity from there. Delaney felt a surge of adrenaline as she climbed the stairs, and by the wide-eyed looks of the others, she wasn’t the only one.

M
oya packed
what belongings he had into his single suitcase as his cell phone rang once more. He didn’t want to end up stranded in a foreign country as a new pestilence roamed, taking all in its path. He figured Calgleef or that Delaney woman were on the other end of the call and was going to let it ring; but after it continued for some time, he picked it up and saw Thorncroft’s name and number on the display. He answered immediately.

“What took you so long?” Thorncroft demanded.

“I was, err, having a crap, Mr. Thorncroft.”

“Hmph.” Thorncroft detested vulgarity but didn’t have the time to waste on reprimands. “The vaccination program appears to have run into some obstacles, which I’m sure you know about, but you were correct about looking for live strains of the flu bacteria in the vaccine. Our biologists discovered it straightaway thanks to your initiative. I’d like to know how you knew Moya, but we’ll keep that for another time, right now we’re in damage control. Calgleef has informed me the hospital has been sealed off and all outgoing calls are currently monitored by one of the American spy agencies, thanks again to your better judgment. The latest information we have, is that patients who received the shot attacked other patients; and staff members said, in the few calls that got out, these attackers wanted to drink their blood.”

“What? That’s, that’s crazy!” Moya was aware that as a businessman of Thorncroft’s standing, honesty and integrity wouldn’t be high on the list of personal traits, but judging by his lack of concern shown for the discovery of live bacteria in the vaccine, he now suspected that deceit most likely was. He would also take the information of the patients becoming blood sucking vampires, with a grain of salt—for now.

“My thoughts exactly, but here is something else I know.” Thorncroft paused to allow the details to digest more. “If this becomes public knowledge, it will not only cost us billions in lost contracts but billions more when the reputation of Thorn Bio-Tech has been torn asunder, even if they can’t prove anything. You do understand, don’t you?”

Moya was sure, however, that the live bacteria that found its way into the vaccine wasn’t by accident; but it would be as hard to prove as Lee Harvey Oswald’s innocence. Thorn, as one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Europe, would be ruined, and Thorncroft now took the time to point the importance of the plan; it had to be salvaged—somehow.

Yes, Moya understood only too well: he couldn’t escape his involvement not matter where he ran to.

“Of course, Mr. Thorncroft, of course.”

He’d made his bed, he rationalized, so he may as well lie in it.

“Good. Here’s what will happen.” Thorncroft told his man in America the next move. “Our director friend of the CDC will come up with a pretext for postponement of the vaccination program without attracting any suspicion. The delay will give the American manufacturing labs time to make enough for their own use. Our quality control responsibility will be over, but our bank accounts will be full, get my meaning, Moya?”

“Yes, sir, but what if someone from the hospital in Des Moines speaks out?”

“How so, Moya? No one, let me assure you, will leave that hospital alive, no one.”

Moya sat on the edge of the bed, his half-packed suitcase beside him. Thorncroft’s last word sent a chill down his back. Yes, he had turned on his beliefs as a medical professional and was prepared to say publicly what he knew to be wrong, all in the pursuit of financial reward; but had it gone so far that he’d now become an accomplice to murder—mass murder? If he hadn’t fully understood before, then he did now. Everyone inside the hospital was to be sacrificed.

* * *

“
O
h shit
!” Delaney was greeted by a closed door at the top of the stairs that led to the second floor.

“Wait, just wait,” Tilford called from below. He was last in the line, behind Childs, which limited his view ahead.

“Let me get by, Jenny,” he said to her. She obliged by stepping to the wall side so he could glide by along the rail. He couldn’t avoid rubbing up against her huge, round breasts, and water-barrel stomach in the confined space, however. He tried to remain as if nothing unusual took place, but when he looked up, Nurse Jenny Childs had a big smile on her face, a glimmer in her eye.

Is she fucking kidding me or what? Our lives are in danger from some freaked-out bloodsuckers, and she gets excited ’cause I rubbed up against her tits?

“What is it?” He ignored Childs’s flirtation and concerned himself with Delaney’s problem.

“The door ahead, what if it’s locked, we’ll be caught in here in—”

“No, no it’s okay. This is a fire exit. It leads to the nurses’ station next to maternity and must be kept open at all times. It has a keycard lock, but it’s not activated,” Tilford told her. He kept his eyes focused on the door ahead; Nurse Childs was close behind and might want to continue to rub up against him some more.

“Better let me take a look first.”

“Going to play the macho man now?”

“Err no, but I know the floor plan better than you,” he countered. He then smiled at her; it was harmless by-play, which he welcomed. He needed something other than Childs’s huge tits to alleviate the stress.

Tilford pushed the door as gently as he could. He didn’t know what to expect, and if any staff were nearby, they would have the same thoughts; he didn’t want to get clonked on the head by an overzealous orderly wielding a bedpan.

When no one challenged him—or lunged at him—Tilford opened the door fully and immediately felt like the sausage that fell from the grill into the hot coals. No one, not a soul, was to be seen at the nurses’ station, chairs were tipped over, papers scattered about and a silence, full of dread, hung over the floor. A hospital isn’t a center of noise and mayhem, most of the time but there was always some activity and background chatter to be detected.

“This doesn’t look promising.” Tilford stepped through and held the door open for the others.

“I assume this floor isn’t normally this quiet?” Delaney hadn’t had the occasion to visit the second floor but knew what hospitals were like.

Before she received answer, Sanders grabbed her by the arm and pointed to a line of blood smeared across the floor toward the counter.

“Were any of the patients who received the vaccine shots brought up here, Nurse?” Tilford was apprehensive about pressing on.

“We ran out of beds in IC, and the stable patients were transferred up here to make room for the more severe sufferers.”

Delaney and Tilford exchanged anxious looks emphasizing their suspicions; if any of the transferred patients exhibited the same behavior as the blood-drinking ghouls from the first floor, then it would be a smorgasbord with expectant mothers confined to beds, and defenseless newborn infants. And the blood on the floor didn’t come from a painful premature birth. They now realized the entire hospital was probably overrun with infected crazies drinking the blood of others.

“We have to find a way out of this building if we’re to survive.” Delaney said to all three.

“But how? We’ve been sealed in?” Childs couldn’t hide the panic she felt.

“The roof. We have to get to the roof through the building maintenance room. There’s a fire escape—”

“Which will take us down into the waiting clutches of the National Guard or the cops—if they don’t shoot us first!” Sanders cut Tilford off.

“And what would you have us do, fly?” Childs asked sharply.

“Let’s not start any arguments among ourselves.” Tilford could see the tension building. “We have to work together, and we can’t go back down; so we have no choice but to head to the roof, right?”

He looked at the others, and when there was no dissension, took that as a sign of agreement.

“Okay then, let’s forge on. Isaac, can that door be locked?” Delaney interjected to get them moving again.

“Only by security and—”

“Security. That’s it!” Delaney raised a finger to the air. Tilford noticed her excitement and energy was infectious; because of her they might just make it yet.

“Where’s security and how do we get there?” The possibility of armed security officers to aid in their escape wasn’t lost on any of them.

“It’s on the first floor, but their office and storeroom is on this floor,” Tilford told the CDC immunologist.

“Lead the way.”

As impressed as he was with Delaney’s leadership qualities they still had to take precautions.

“It’s that way, through those doors.” Tilford pointed to the double doors with the path of smeared blood beneath.

“How far? Can we make a run for it?”

“Not far, but those things move fast. I mean, you saw them pounce on Gerard. I’m not sure we could outrun them.” He didn’t say it, didn’t need too, everyone knew he meant their chances of outrunning the ghouls with Nurse Childs with them were slim.

They moved through the side entrance behind the counter; Tilford had a quick look for anything that might resemble a weapon, but without luck.

“Maybe we use tranquilizers or a strong sedative on them?”

“You want to get that close to administer it, Jenny?” Tilford’s answer ended that idea.

“There,” Delaney saw a mop and knocked-over bucket outside the door of the male restroom, “we can use that!”

“And just who is ‘we’?” Tilford knew he would be the designated jouster. It was better than the array of hole-punchers and staple guns on the counter; he would have some distance with the mop, which was wet, giving it more weight and hopefully impact.

“Get in behind me, ladies, and when I says so, you run, just fucking run, okay?” Tilford said as, with mop held high in two hands, he approached the door. Not wanting to slip over, the four of them did their best to avoid the blood on the floor.

“Ready?” Tilford asked Delaney, Sanders and Childs. He waited until he received a compliant nod from each before proceeding. Taking a deep breath, he pushed open one side of the double doors that led into the main corridor of the maternity unit.