DEAD: Onset: Book One of the New DEAD series, Page 3

  “Your little lady needs the hospital.” I thought I heard him mutter ‘For whatever good it’ll do her now’ under his breath. “I think I’m just gonna walk home.”

  “Wait…what? You’re leaving?”

  “I gotta get home and take care of business. If I was you, I’d…” His voice faded and he glanced back over his shoulder. At last, he turned back to face me. “Look, I know you gotta take her to the hospital. I ain’t gonna try to talk you out of it.” I opened my mouth, but he motioned me to be quiet. “I can tell you ain’t ready to believe me yet…but I think you will before long. Just don’t wait until it’s too late. If I can impress upon you how important it will be to get your missy there checked in and then maybe you come home once they take her in back. Come home and see to your dog maybe.”

  I glanced down at Chewie. She wagged what was left of her tail and blood splattered the sofa and the television screen with gruesome results.

  “I’ll patch her as best I can and get that fella out of your bedroom—” That snapped me out of my haze for a moment.

  “What about the police?” I blurted.

  “I can call ‘em, but I don’t think they’ll be coming too soon. Sounds like they got enough troubles at the moment.”

  That was when the sounds of sirens filtered in and registered in my consciousness. How was all of this happening so quickly? Maybe I was still asleep and would wake to my alarm any moment now to start my first day as a teacher.

  “You need to hurry up and get her to the hospital if there is gonna be any chance at all.” Carl was now herding Steph and me to the front door. “You hurry…and don’t stop for anybody. When you get to the hospital…” He stopped again and I could tell he was struggling with something as he stared at Steph. “Just you try to remember what I was saying about all this. Nobody is gonna want to believe it. Nobody will accept it for what it is until it’s too late. Sad thing is, I think we already tipped past that point and are sliding head first into a big shit storm the like of which none of us are ready to face. Hell, I barely believe it myself.”

  Somehow, as he’d spoken, Carl had managed to get us to my truck. I thought I saw a few of the onlookers from that crowd at the corner standing in the neighbor’s yard. Honestly, if you asked me five minutes from now, I don’t know what I would remember.

  The truck almost seemed to be driving itself as I made my way to Legacy Hospital. I was oblivious to anything but reaching the beacon of help that the hospital represented.

  “Just stay with me, Steph,” I kept repeating every few blocks…or maybe it was every few seconds.

  Each time I glanced over at her, she was simply staring straight ahead. I doubted that she was seeing anything. Seven times I had to pull over for emergency vehicles of all sorts. Also, I drove past one apartment complex that looked to be swarming with police as well as three ambulances. It was around then that I realized I kept hearing the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire. That was when it became clear to me that maybe Steph wasn’t the only one in shock.

  As I sat behind a Tri-Met bus and waited for the light to change, I physically slapped my face a few times. The first two times barely registered, but by the third time, I felt clarity return. At least I was hoping that was the case.

  At last, I pulled into the emergency entrance and miraculously found a place to park. My eyes took in the surroundings and I realized that there were two ambulances in the bay. Things were compounded by the fact that the parking lot looked to be nearing capacity. I wasn’t a regular at hospitals, but that seemed to be a bit much.

  I climbed out of the truck and made my way around to the passenger side. I opened the door, but Steph was still just staring straight ahead. I undid her seatbelt and took her good hand. She was like a robot, but she climbed out.

  “It’s a surprise,” she said when her eyes finally looked up at me. Tears added some of the shine back, but those dark tracers seemed to be growing darker and lacing her normally beautiful hazel eyes with something terrible.

  I was taken aback by her words. They’d been the first she’d uttered since the house where all she had basically done was scream hysterically.

  “What’s a surprise, Steph?” I asked.

  We stood that way for a while, but she had slipped back into shock or whatever it was that had her acting like a…

  Zombie? Was I really about to use that word?

  I shoved that out of my head along with all the nonsense that Carl had been spewing. Hell, that was probably why that word came to mind. Well, I’d be giving him a dose…if the cops didn’t arrest his ass. I wasn’t sure they would be able to overlook the fact that he’d busted up that guy so bad despite the fact that the bastard had attacked Steph.

  What about those other injuries? the voice in my head piped up, but I shut that down fast as well. I wrapped an arm protectively around Steph as we made our way to the entrance of the emergency room of Legacy hospital. We were almost there when she began to slump against me.

  I felt her knees go and moved to scoop her into my arms. Her head lolled back as I began to carry her as fast as I could to those twin sets of double doors. I stepped on the electrical pad that cause the doors to swing open and I rushed inside.

  “Help!” I croaked.

  2

  Legacy

  I sat beside the bed and looked down at the still form lying there. The slow but steady beep of the heart monitor was the only thing providing me with any strength at the moment. The last few hours had been a blur of signing forms and answering questions.

  When I’d told of the attack, the doctors had barely flinched. There was no look of surprise or astonishment at the fact that a strange man had broken into my house and bitten my fiancée. I’d felt obliged to tell them about Carl and what he’d done. I might not have given every single detail, but I’d told them I was pretty sure that he’d killed the guy.

  As they treated Steph, I was asked to wait in the lobby. I’d been certain that the police would come. They would start asking me questions, and then they would go and probably arrest Carl. My mind was already putting things in order as best as possible to hopefully minimize the trouble that the crazy woodshop teacher would get into. After all, he’d taken down the animal that had attacked Steph; that was the least I could do for him.

  But they never came.

  Every single time those double doors opened, I expected to see men in blue uniforms. They would go to the front desk, ask a question of the intake receptionist and she would point at me. They would come over and start asking about the murder.

  But they never came.

  Eventually, a doctor stepped out of the entrance to the emergency room’s treatment area and called my name.

  “Evan Berry?” the haggard looking doctor shouted over the din of a waiting room that was becoming more crowded by the minute.

  I stood and followed him back to the cubicle where they had treated Steph. I’d been told that she was sedated and that a doctor would be coming to talk with me soon.

  “You’re a doctor,” I’d snapped. “Why can’t you tell me what is going on? She is going to be fine, right? I mean…people don’t die from a bite on the arm no matter how nasty that one happens to be.”

  “I’m just an intern, and I have no idea about your wife’s condition,” the man replied flatly. I didn’t bother to correct him about our marital status.

  He’d swept open the curtain and ushered me inside. I’d stepped over to her bed and then turned to ask another question, but the intern was already gone. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just held her hand. The beeps of her monitor my only reassurance as I waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Twice I pulled myself away from my beloved to pull aside the curtain that was our partition. I watched as harried doctors and nurses scurried about like ants in a hill that had been kicked. I knew there was no sense trying to slow one down enough to get any answers. I heard enough yelling and demands being shouted by other frustra
ted people who were as in the dark about the condition of the person they were with as I was with Steph.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered, squeezing her hand. “This is all wrong. I just want you to open your eyes and tell me that you are going to be okay.”

  But she didn’t. The hours continued to tick by. I must have slipped off to sleep, because a scream very similar to the one I’d heard from Steph caused me to start. My first reaction was to jump up from my chair and look her over to ensure that nothing had happened during my slumber.

  That was when the next sound registered. My mouth went dry as my eyes flashed to the heart monitor whose comforting beeps had acted as the lullaby that sent me to dream land. It had to be wrong. All the numbers were at zero, there was a light flashing, and this annoying buzzer was blaring. I have no idea how long that had been going off or why it hadn’t snapped me awake instantly unless it had just started. Honestly, I was so disoriented that I could not be sure.

  I quickly turned and ripped open the divider curtain. What I saw was an impossibility. The central nurses’ station was empty. There were doctors and nurses fighting with patients all around the emergency room area. I watched as one doctor went down under a trio of patients in their flimsy gowns. A geyser of blood sprayed in syncopation with the failing heartbeat up as the scream turned to a gurgle. A smear of blood at my feet drew my attention to the left where what looked like a paramedic was sprawled flat on her back. A woman was hunched over her and the noise I heard made my stomach lurch. Her gown was gone and she was squatting rather obscenely, her nakedness apparently not something she cared about in the least.

  My eyes refused to look away as I shifted just enough to look around the hunched over shoulders of the woman. I guess I had to confirm what my brain was trying to tell me. I watched as blood slicked hands reached into an open cavity that had been torn in the paramedic’s abdomen and pulled out strands of things that, up until now, I’d only seen in biology textbooks.

  The sounds of screams were coming from every direction and they were of a nature that I’d never experienced. Coupled with the thick and pungent stench that was very much like what I’d smelled from that man in our house, my senses were simply too overwhelmed to allow me to do anything. All I could do at the moment was stand rooted to my spot in the opening to the cubicle where my Steph was lying on a gurney with a monitor that was screaming an unanswered call for help.

  Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye and I’d forced myself to turn back around. “What the…” My disbelief caused my mouth to go even drier, if that were possible, and my words died deep in my throat as it felt as if my esophagus had shrunk to a pinhole.

  Steph was sitting up. Her face was slack and void of any emotion. That normal golden olive tone was gone. Her flesh appeared to be a bluish-gray. Her hair was an unkempt nest that hung lifelessly past her shoulders; but it was her eyes that had me unable to look away. It was the eyes that told me that this was not my Stephanie…my beloved…my fiancée.

  Her normally bright hazel eyes were now covered with that same ugly film I’d seen in the eyes of the man who’d attacked her. The black tracers were etched deeper and darker now…a true black.

  “No…it isn’t possible,” I managed past a tongue that felt like sandpaper.

  What felt like another person moving fast collided with my back and sent me sprawling into the cubicle. I ended up partially laid out across the foot of the gurney that held Steph. The struggle behind me was a mix of grunts and moans that somehow managed to make it to my ears despite the awful screams and symphony of discordant alarms. It was all becoming just more of the ambient noise that I imagined a person heard when they first arrived in Hell.

  Something cool slapped down on my left arm and I turned my head to see that it was Steph’s hands. The thing is, I knew her touch. I’d felt it a million times in these past years that she and I had spent together. That touch I was feeling right this moment was not her in any way, shape, or form. The feel of her hand on my skin never failed to give me chills. It was having that very same effect; but now it was for an entirely different reason.

  I shoved myself away, feeling the tips of her fingers as they lost purchase just as they were about to close over my forearm. The struggle behind me shifted from eerie moans and labored grunts to a whimpering.

  “No…no…Marty…it’s me!” a voice cried.

  I looked down to see a young girl no older than fifteen as she pawed at a woman who looked to be in her forties. The girl was on top and looked to be trying to lean in and take a bite out of the woman who lay on her back. I heard the click of teeth snapping together and was about to step in and yank the crazed child off the woman.

  Then, a sound made the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up on end and I jerked my head over to where Steph was now struggling to get off of the gurney. That sound could not have come from her, I told myself. Then…her mouth opened.

  The sound of a baby’s cry came from her as she reached for me with both hands and plummeted to the floor when her balance shifted too far to one side. Out of reflex, I lunged to try and catch her. In the process, I stumbled over the two figures that were wrestling on the floor at the entrance to our cubicle.

  I ended up in a heap of bodies as the sounds of screaming and begging crashed down on me. Something tugged on my side and I pushed away. It was worse than any nightmare I could recall as I managed to reach a sitting position.

  Stephanie seemed to have forgotten about me as she struggled with the flailing arm of the woman who had been trying to fend off the girl she’d identified as ‘Marty’ a moment ago. That girl had been knocked back against a cabinet and was now on her hands and knees as she crawled back towards the poor woman who was now shrieking as Steph leaned in and took a bite from the arm she held onto.

  I could actually see the skin stretch and then rip as Steph’s teeth found purchase. Blood welled and then sprayed as a large chunk of meat was torn away. That was when I heard “the scream” again and knew what it signaled.

  I’d seen the movies. Oddly enough, I was actually a bit of a fan. Granted, I was a bit more into the more recent titles like the 2004 Zak Snyder remake of Dawn of the Dead, but I’d never once considered the possibility. It just wasn’t…realistic?

  The woman screamed again, her register going from high to ear-splitting in seconds as Steph leaned in and tore away another chunk of her arm—this time a piece of the bicep. By now, Marty was there at the woman’s side and her hands were ripping at the black button-up shirt. The sounds of the plastic buttons bouncing off the tile floor found a way into my ears despite the cacophony of noise.

  I started to stand and Steph’s head rotated in a slow series of bird-like jerks and fits until her horrifying gaze met mine. There was nothing of her in what I saw. In fact, I could not even look at this thing with the blood dripping from between its lips as it chewed on the raw meat of the shrieking woman’s arm and recognize even a hint of the woman I loved with all my heart.

  For a split second, I worried that the two creatures crouched on the floor would come after me, but apparently they were content with ripping that poor woman apart. I took one slow step after another as I backed away from the cubicle, but now my head was searching from left to right as more of the fresh Hell that was Legacy’s emergency room came into view.

  I saw a man on the floor just to my right as he started to sit up. The rip on his belly allowed for a variety of things to come spilling out across the floor as he rolled to his side and onto his knees in order to stand.

  The taste of bile was already building in the back of my throat, and my mouth filled with saliva in anticipation, but I forced it down and moved away. My eyes found the ‘EXIT’ sign across the room. If there was a place I could have been that put me farther away, I didn’t know of its existence. A cry for help to my left turned my head, and I watched as a doctor went under two men and a woman who all had the same skin discoloration and tracer-riddled,
filmed-over eyes.

  I saw a way across the room if I moved now. With one final look back, I had to battle past the pain in my heart as I saw that thing that had once been my Stephanie. She was pulling out a strand of what I had to guess to be intestines from the gaping rip in the soft belly of the woman who was no longer screaming or struggling as she was fed upon by the two figures hunched over her splayed form.

  It was tearing me up inside, but my brain was already screaming for me to run. I took off, planting my hands on the counter of the nurses’ station and vaulting over it. At least, that had been my intention.

  My right hand found a few pieces of paper that had been left on the counter and it shot out to the side. I slammed into the counter, a stinging pain shooting down my right hip where the bone slammed into the hard, flat surface. I stifled a cry as I threw my right leg up and onto the flat counter space. Heaving myself up, I was about to climb over when the body of what I guessed to have once been a nurse sat up and tilted her face up at me.

  Her death had been horrific…but then, which of the ones happening all around me at the moment weren’t? Her attacker had taken a bite out of her face, ripping the entire nose away to leave a cavernous hole in the middle. A patch of scalp had been torn away as well, and that had allowed for copious amounts of blood to pour down and create a crimson mask that was now turning dark brown or even black in places. When the mouth opened, a low guttural moan escaped that seemed odd coming from such a petite woman.

  I brought my other leg up and around so that I was now seated and facing this thing. As it reached for me, I kicked out as hard as I could and sent it toppling over on its back. Not waiting to see how much the blow affected it, I vaulted off the counter and to the floor where I ran along the large circle with computer monitors and file holders strewn all about my path.

  By the time I’d gone halfway around the giant circular station, a few of the mangled occupants had turned to me and were shambling in my direction.