The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (2 page)

“Syls, I’ll call. I’m not—”

My mother snorts. We jump. I watch her chest until it moves and, when it does, I hate the relief I feel. I do want our tenuous connection cut. I imagine a heavenly pair of shears snipping the thread that keeps me bent toward my mother. Once severed, I’ll stand upright. I don’t need a session with Grace to break the news that I’m behind in my evolution toward Healthy Adult Human.

We sit as the evening comes and the spaces between my mother’s breaths lengthen. They’ve told me to watch for this—it could mean the end. After a particularly long breath, I wait for the next one. Thirty seconds pass. One minute. Two. I clutch the arm of my chair. Grace stands when I do, but I wave her back down.

At three minutes, I force myself to the bed. Her eyelids are slightly parted, cracked lips agape, chest sunken. She looks vacant and ruined, which isn’t a huge departure from her usual appearance. It’s an unkind thought to have when your mother is dying—is dead—but it runs through my mind at four minutes. The five minute mark passes with Grace’s sniffles the only sound. At six, I’m sure she’s gone.

Grace’s hand settles on my shoulder. “I’ll give you a minute,” she says quietly.

I don’t want the minute, but I hear Grace’s unspoken warning. It says I’ll regret not saying goodbye once my anger has cooled. And I might have regrets; I often do. I rest a finger on the back of my mom’s hand. The loose skin bunches under my touch. It isn’t as cold as I expected.

“Bye,” I whisper.

Where there was life, there was the opportunity for something—an apology, sobriety, a declaration of love. I thought I hadn’t held out hope, but the heavy feeling in my chest suggests that isn’t true. It’s over, and it ended the same way it’s gone for the past two decades. My mother will never make amends, will never be held accountable. She’s died just as selfishly as she lived.

I contemplate kicking the bed. I go as far as lifting my foot but then imagine the rabbit hole of anger I’ll fall into if I give in to my wild urge. I won’t let my mother get to me. Not now, not as the very last thing she does in her miserable life.

Eleven minutes. There’s no long, plaintive beep that would alert the hospital to her death. I have to find a nurse and find out what comes next. They’ll know what’s in store for her body, if not for me.

I step inside the bathroom. Grace looks up from where she washes her hands, eyes bloodshot. “I guess that’s that,” I say, and lean against the wall with my fists clenched behind my back.

“I’m so sorry, Syl—”

“Should I press the call button, do you think?”

Grace dries her hands on her jeans and wraps her arms around me. I give her a perfunctory pat and pull away. “It’s okay to be sad,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you forgive her.”

Damn right I don’t forgive her. “Right now I just want to find out what we need to do and leave, okay?”

I stow the leftover food in my messenger bag without looking Mom’s way, then throw in my phone and coat, not-so-secretly happy to be escaping this room and my childhood. Grace glances at my mother’s still form, but I don’t look back.

Chapter 2

The corridor is empty and the nurses’ station unmanned. A patient groans softly from behind a partially open door. Grace and I wait for five minutes, hands clasped on the counter. It feels unreal. I’m not standing in a hospital corridor less than thirty minutes after my mother has died. Her body is not on a bed down the hall. I should be feeling something other than this nothingness and an overwhelming desire to run.

I wonder what would happen if I cut out. Would they hunt me down and force me to take her body, or would they bury her in a potter’s field? I won’t do it—I’m not heartless. I have money saved, enough for a nice funeral, but I’m not spending it on a fancy box for my mother. That money is so that I can quit my copywriting job, and Ruth Rossi is not taking that away from me the way she took countless other things. Cremation is my plan, although I don’t want the ashes, and the only places I can think to scatter them are a liquor store or her favorite flophouse.

Five more minutes pass. Still no nurse—only quiet, tiled corridors with fluorescent lights above. I tap my fingers on the counter and stare at a large dark stain on the beige floor tile down the hall. Someone should really clean that up.

That patient groans again, like he’s dying. I guess he
is
dying, since he’s on this part of the floor.

“Let’s go downstairs,” I say. “Maybe we can ask someone at the information desk.” Grace nods.

We continue toward the elevators. I hear a rustle from inside a room and peek in the open door. The bed curtains are drawn and the lights are off but for a dim light over the bed. Bright pink Croc-clad feet show in the gap between curtain and floor. Crocs mean nurse. Socked feet stand beside them. A patient. The feet don’t move. They’re up to something, though—I see shadowy movement. It smells like shit and something rotten. I do not envy the nurse’s current endeavor.

We lean on the corridor wall and wait to nab the nurse on her way out. Finally, when the urge to escape overrides politeness, I poke my head into the room. “Excuse me? Sorry, I just…I’m waiting for someone to help me with my mother. No rush, we’re just in the hall.” The feet shuffle, but there’s no response. I move away and lean beside Grace. “I don’t know if she heard me.”

“She has to come out at some point.”

I let my head fall against the wall. Half a minute later, we straighten at footsteps from the room. A woman in rumpled blue scrubs limps through the door, her face turned away. Her hands are covered in what could be blood, and her brown ponytail is knotted and scraggly. Something about her is off, but she’s clearly a nurse and can tell me what I need to do to get the hell out of here. I clear my throat again.

She turns. Her mouth is ringed with blood that dribbles from her chin and coats the front of her scrub shirt. Her strange silvery-blue eyes fix on mine, violent and angry but somehow also lifeless. My mother went crazy a few times—drug-induced psychosis—but, even crazy, her eyes were wild and angry and
alive
. Not like this.

Something is more than off. Something is extraordinarily wrong. I stumble backward into Grace just as two patients in blood-drenched hospital gowns enter the hall behind the nurse. Their eyes are pale, as if the color’s been sucked from the iris, and their skin is waxen. All three move toward us on jerky marionette legs.

Grace whispers my name, but I can’t take my eyes off the creatures coming our way. Guttural sounds, part hiss and part groan, emerge from their open mouths, and the buzz in my brain becomes a whole-body hum of fear. They’re not angry—they’re feral. And they’re coming for us. There’s no doubt they are.

Grace tugs my sleeve, pulling me back a foot. “Sylvie!”

Grace, the rational one, should be talking me down, but her green eyes are circles of fright. I don’t care if this is an honest mistake we’ll laugh off in a few minutes. My gut screams to flee, and I trust it. We stumble the first few steps and then run for the elevators and stairs in the adjoining hall.

We pass that stain on the floor. Still wet. Dark red. I felt disconnected before, midway between normalcy and my mother’s death, but now I’m fully present, adrenaline zinging and lungs just short of collapse.

We round the bend to find an empty hall. Grace’s eyes are huge. “Is it the virus that—”

She drags me back mid-step, nails digging into my forearm. Down the hall, a man has limped from the open elevator doors. His polo shirt is untucked, khakis torn, graying hair slicked to his temple with blood. Blood is smudged from his lips to his cheeks. His mouth issues that animal hiss. More people spill out with the same crazy eyes and angry snarls, and they all stagger our way. The stairs are past the elevators. We’ll never make it.

I think I scream. My throat feels as if I’ve screamed. I don’t know if I yank Grace or she yanks me, but we run back to my mother’s corridor. The nurse is still advancing, with the two patients behind her. At a distance, I take in every detail I missed before. A clotted beard of tissue hangs from her chin. Blood bubbles down her lower lip. A tear in her scrub shirt reveals a savage hole in her torso in which ribs flash white and muscles flex. An organ, connected deep inside by a rope of flesh, bounces off her quadriceps with every step. Her pants are soaked red. No one could survive that, virus-crazy or not. It should be impossible she can walk at all.

But she
is
.
Her Crocs leave two ribbons of blood in her wake.

Zombies.

The thought is crazy, and I focus on our continued existence rather than entertain it. We can push through these three, maybe, and get to the double doors at the far end of the hall. We could hide in a room, but the patient rooms don’t lock. Grace’s head whips side to side. There are three in front and close to a dozen behind us. We don’t need to speak to know we should run. And our only way out is through.

“The doors,” I say. My voice barely registers in my own ears, but Grace nods and takes my hand. Hers is as cold as mine.

Shoe soles tap-drag behind us. Polo Shirt. Grace moves first, running for the nurse and patients, and pulls left when the three join ranks to meet us. She slams into the wall but doesn’t stop. They spin as we pass, and I shudder at the touch of a hand on my sleeve. Then they’re behind us, though I can feel them coming. This is every dream where I’m chased, where I fall and freeze as the monster closes in. The panic exploding in my chest is the same—no, worse—because this isn’t a dream. But we can run. We can leave the monsters behind.

My mother’s room goes by in a blur. We crash against the push bars of the double doors. Locked. We pound the windows. Someone must be in the world that lies beyond—a sane, quiet world of empty hallways and clean tile floors—but no one comes. We spin with our backs to the door. The nurse and patients are almost at the nurses’ station half a hall away, and the others aren’t far behind.

Hiding in a room is our only choice. A bad choice. Even if the bathrooms lock, we’ll be trapped. There’s no one on this floor to rescue us.
Maybe there’s no one anywhere
. My already overtaxed heart seizes at the thought.

An elderly woman shuffles out of a room down the hall, her heels barely rising from her lavender slippers. Her hair is a fuzzy shock of white and her shoulders are stooped. She swivels her head toward the nurse and patients. She’s not one of
them
—she steps carefully, befuddled and blinking and, I’m pretty sure, about to die.

The group veers toward her. “Go in your room!” I scream.

She turns our way and shuffles another step, mouth hanging and eyes squinted in question.

“Go back inside!” Grace screeches.

The nurse seizes the elderly woman from behind, then pushes her to the wall and buries her face in her neck. The woman steps out of a slipper in her effort to escape on spindly, pale legs. Her thin, high wail rises above the hoarse groans that fill the hall, and her bony arms push once, twice, then hang limp. She slumps to the floor. The infected are down in seconds, faces plunging to her legs and arms and abdomen. The nurse raises her head, jaw working. She’s chewing. Eating.

The virus. They said it made people violent. They didn’t say it did this.

But there’s no mistaking it. And we’ll be next if we don’t hide. I don’t think they’ll be occupied for long. My mother’s room. I’m almost positive the bathroom locks. I drag in a breath. Grace trembles at my side. She whimpers, or maybe it was me.

Another door opens, closer to us but just past the nurses’ station. A man enters the hall. “What’s happening out—”

The crowd looks up. Stripped flesh hangs from mouths. The man stands unmoving for a long moment before he ducks back inside and slams the door. Polo Shirt and some others stagger to their feet, and Grace and I freeze like prey in sight of a predator. My muscles quiver and sweat tickles my back with the effort it takes to be still, to not run or scream or cower.
Don’t see us, don’t look at us
, I beg silently.

Polo Shirt rams the man’s door. A tall woman in a blood-streaked peach suit pushes, her head shuddering and teeth bared. Her sheer determination is scary, and her frenzy is terrifying. She’s heated.
Hungry
. The others swarm the door. It gives an inch and slams shut. They thrust again. There’s no sign of cooperation between them, but they’re a relentless force.

A high-pitched shriek comes from inside the room, followed by a man’s deep yell. The door opens. Shuts. Again and again. Now’s our chance, while they’re focused on the door. And on that poor man and whoever else might be in there with him. It’s an awful thing to be grateful they’ve found another distraction but, if they hadn’t, we’d be dead.

My legs are jelly. I don’t have enough oxygen to run. We’re going to die, heaped on the floor in a pool of blood like that old lady.

“My mother’s room,” I whisper. Grace’s head jerks in a nod.

But we don’t get the chance—the double doors behind us swing back, depositing me and Grace on our asses. Hands lift me to my feet by my armpits. I kick at what turns out to be a living, breathing, cherubic-cheeked man in his mid-forties. His broad frame fills out his scrubs and his brown hair waves across his scalp to gather in a short curly ponytail at the nape of his neck. He backs away with his hands in the air, one of which holds a shiny meat cleaver. Two uniformed NYPD officers, one young, one older, flank him. The baby-faced cop moves to the doors while the gray mustachioed one stays back.

The young cop motions down the hall. “What’s happening?”

All the infected are at the man’s door now, although the nurse has started our way, organ bouncing.

“Someone’s in there,” Grace says tremulously.

Another shout. Another slam. The door opens three inches this time. The young cop strides down the hall, gun lifted. An ear-splitting bang rips through the air. The top of the nurse’s head erupts in a splatter. I duck at another roar and my eardrums thrum.

“Kearney!” the young cop shouts.

The older cop brushes past, raises his gun and follows his partner. I cover my ears as the shooting begins. A few of the infected head
toward
the guns. Toward us. The bullets hit a chest, a neck, and the impact knocks them back, but they don’t stop moving. One’s head bursts, and it goes down for good. The man with the ponytail waves us behind him, then moves to the double doors with his cleaver at the ready.