Afterbirth (25 page)

Zach started up the second flight of stairs and wondered how much further he could carry his unconscious wife. “Allison, honey, come on, wake up.” He shook her and her head fell back over his arm. He leaned against the wall and shifted her weight, but the bulky dressings on her feet made it impossible to even the load.

Corey scratched at his face and huffed out a breath. “Would you hurry up? It stinks in here.”

Zach ignored him and kept the slow pace.

With each step the smell grew stronger.

“Allison, baby, can you hear me?” If she could even wrap one arm around his neck it would make things easier. A hundred pounds never felt so heavy. “Why isn’t she waking up?”

“It’s the pain-killer,” Corey said, moving on without any offer of help. “She’ll be out for hours.” His voice trailed off as he got farther away.

Zach nodded, but something didn’t feel right. Allison’s body radiated heat and her forehead beaded with sweat. Zach’s shirt was soaked through where she pressed against him and her breathing had become shallow and raspy.

“Oh, shit.” Corey stopped a good ten stairs ahead of Zach and for the first time, Zach caught up.

“What?”

“My guess?” Corey wrinkled his nose and coughed. “It’s the source of the stink.”

Zach stared at the dripping pile of decomposing flesh creeping down the stairs toward them. Broken bones mixed with hair, skin, teeth, and tissue. Handprints covered the wall and railing and footsteps led away from the mess. “Someone was here.”

“More than one someone by the looks of things.”

Zach didn’t mean the pile, which was an obvious mix of at least a half-dozen corpses. There was an indentation where the bones were more broken than in the rest of the pile. Someone had fallen and pulled themselves out of the mess. The crooked trail leading away from the scene said they’d limped away. Zach would bet anything they hadn’t survived to talk about it.

“We can’t get through that,” he said. “
I
can’t get through that. Not and carry Allison, too.”

Corey rolled his eyes. “There are at least a dozen other staircases in this place.”

“It was hard enough getting her this far.” Zach turned around and headed for the second floor entrance. “Get the door, would you?”

Corey held his pistol out in front of him and swept the Labor and Delivery unit before letting Zach in. “All clear.”

Zach edged past him, his arms and back on fire from the strain of the dead weight. The corpse of an infected woman, naked and with sagging flesh, spread across the hallway.

Corey waved for him to keep moving. “Looks like someone’s already started the clean-up. I checked her. She’s not going anywhere.”

“Make sure there’s nothing else, would you?” Zach shifted Allison’s weight and set her down on a gurney in a nearby patient room, relieving the strain on his muscles. A metallic twang soured the air. He stepped on the lever of a trash can marked “biohazard” and a swarm of flies sprang from a nest of maggots feeding on fresh blood
.
“What the hell?”

Corey appeared in the doorway and swatted at the fly buzzing around his head. “All clear.”

Zach lifted the side rails to keep Allison from rolling out of bed. He brushed her damp bangs back from her face and kissed her hot forehead. “No signs of
anyone
?” He covered Allison with a blanket and, after checking her breathing, moved the trash can into the hallway.

“See for yourself.”

Zach reluctantly locked the door, knowing only Nixon had keys. “What do you call those?”

It didn’t take much investigation to see that Corey was no tracker. Footprints, like those they had seen in the stairwell, led to a closed door not four rooms away from Allison’s. Zach rolled his eyes and drew his pistol. He approached the room slowly, pressed his ear to the door, and when no sound came from inside, threw it open. The stench hit him head-on. Soaked clothing piled on the floor and he held his breath to get to it. A box of gloves hung on the shower room wall and he put a pair on, fearful of the infection.

“What are you doing?” Corey buried the lower half of his face in his elbow.

“What you were too stupid to do.” He kicked the shirt away and withdrew the wallet from the back pocket of a pair of soggy jeans. The license identified the owner as Brian Foster.

It was another connection, no matter how indirect, to Miranda.

The smell of death was thick inside Nixon’s office. Lois, his secretary, had begun to putrefy, and since the fifth floor windows didn’t open, he was trapped with the stink. Wayne’s desperate pleas for help had silenced and Nixon feared the worst, expecting that there was a several hundred pound man now waiting to eat him. Nothing about resuming his place at the center had gone as planned and he prayed, that once the hordes were eliminated and the generator was up and running, the cost of the return will have been worth it.

He bent down to the drawer and found the hybrid boy barely moving. The I.V. bag had dried up and drew his blood back into the tubing. Nixon undid the tape and quickly removed the line.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, though the boy’s condition had been too touch-and-go for him to believe it. He peeled back the blanket and examined his pale skin. The bluish-black lesions had spread to his chest and worsened as he looked at them. The antibiotic wasn’t working and there was no way out of his office to find an alternative. He listened to the boy’s chest and a suspicious rattle surfaced among the faint breath sounds. His heartbeat had slowed, and when Nixon rolled the boy to check his back, he huffed out a breath and went limp.

“Not again.”

Nixon’s hands shook as he lifted the boy and laid him out on the carpet. The infant’s white eyes stared blankly ahead and his mouth, full of needle teeth, fell open. Nixon removed the oxygen mask and resumed the CPR he’d already performed twice en route from the cabin.

“Don’t do this to me.”

He placed three fingers to the boy’s tiny chest and performed thirty quick compressions. His hands ached from the last time. He covered the boy’s nose and mouth and gave him two gentle breaths. He tapped the boy’s shoulder and when he couldn’t be roused, resumed the compressions.

One, two, three…

He counted in his head, refusing to be distracted by the growling and scratching at his office door, and gave the boy two more breaths.

“Come on, breathe.”

The boy’s legs went plank-straight and his arms tensed at his sides. Dark, almost black, blood seeped from the former I.V. site. A gurgling noise rose from his throat and he started to choke.

“No, no. Don’t do this.” Nixon let the boy cough, knowing it was the best way to dislodge whatever was stuck, and watched, helplessly, as the boy clung to life. Thick foam ran from the corner of his mouth and he stopped breathing. Nixon panicked, desperate to help clear the block. He cradled the boy, face-up, in his arms and swept his mouth with his thumb and first finger. He didn’t feel anything and rolled the boy onto his stomach, delivering gentle back blows.

“Stay with me.”

The boy’s flaccid body hung over his forearm, his arms and legs dangling.

He rolled him onto his back and alternated the thrust to his back with ones to his chest.

“Come on, come on. You can do this.”

He returned the boy to a face-down position and did a final sweep all the way to the back of his throat. A thick mucus plug dislodged and a rush of air came over Nixon’s hand. The boy resumed breathing and closed his jaw down, hard, on Nixon’s finger.

“Shit!”

The harder Nixon tried to get free, the stronger the boy’s bite became. A warm trickle of blood ran down his hand and skin peeled away as he pushed past the incendiary pain to pull loose what was left of his pointer finger.

The boy started to cry.

Nixon had saved him a final time, but it had cost him.

He ran to the bathroom and checked, again, for the shots he knew were no longer there. The bite was even worse than he imagined. His second knuckle bone emerged from the pulpy, stripped flesh. He held his finger over the sink and wrapped paper towels tightly around it to control the bleeding.

“Shit, shit, shit!”

He searched for something, anything, to stop the virus from circulating through his bloodstream. His heart raced and he was lightheaded from hyperventilation.
Think. How do you stop this?
Amputation was out of the question, though he’d have done it if he had the tools. A tourniquet was a temporary solution and a long-shot. If he could stop the blood flow from his hand, the virus would circulate much slower. He grabbed a length of the plastic tubing affixed to the portable oxygen tank and tied it as tightly as he could around his forearm. His hand went instantly cold and numb, a good sign, all things considered.

He looked at his watch, noting the time, and tried to steady his breath. There were no hard and fast rules about the infection, and he had nothing but averages to guess how long he had left to finish the work worth risking his life for. He sighed and walked out into the room, which he hadn’t noticed with the commotion, had gone silent.

“Oh, God. No.”

He knelt next to the infant whose mouth and chin were painted with his blood, and felt for a non-existent pulse. His pale skin had turned blue and his body had gone cold. Tears rolled down Nixon’s cheeks as he tried, one last time, to do CPR with his non-dominant hand. The awkward compressions and the half-hearted attempt at breathing for the boy had no effect. The taste of his own blood on his lips made him queasy. The boy had been gone too long this time. It wouldn’t be long until he joined him.

The confined shower room stunk worse than the stairwell and Corey could taste the rot as he breathed through his mouth.

Zach tucked the identification back inside the wallet and dropped it on top of the clothing.

“I’m not too stupid,” Corey said, refuting Zach’s claim. “I’m smart enough to know not to touch shit covered in liquid infection.”

Zach waved his gloved hands.

“Whose pants are they, anyway?” Corey’s cheek itched, the months old scar a constant annoyance with no signs of improving.

“Brian Foster.”

“The name supposed to mean something to me?”

Zach peeled off the slimy gloves and threw them into the trash. “He was before your time, but Nixon should know that he’s been here.”

“Then tell him,” Corey said, annoyed by the comment.

“Can’t,” Zach said. “I have something to do.”

Corey followed him out of the shower room and the door slammed shut behind them. He scratched the perpetual itch, which was more habit than affliction, and called after Zach who was already halfway down the hall. “Where the hell are you going?” he asked.

Zach turned around and pulled the slide back on his pistol. “Nixon was headed up to five. Check his old office at the end of the hall. Tell him we found Brian Foster’s I.D. and that I’m on it.”

“On what?”

Zach didn’t answer.

“Tell him you’re on what?”

Corey remembered the mess a floor up and headed down the hallway in search of another set of stairs. In a hospital this size, it wasn’t hard to find one. He checked to make sure his safety was off and climbed the next three flights. He opened the door to the fifth floor hallway and breathed through his mouth as he entered the foul-smelling construction zone.

“What the hell?”

The decomposed remains of a garroted male lay on the floor of what looked like a makeshift security room. There was no way of knowing whether or not he’d been infected before he died.

Corey pulled the door shut and continued through the hanging sheets of plastic which kept his view short-sighted.

Anxiety tightened his chest and he feared something jumping out at any minute. Each step was carefully guarded and he did his best to walk silently.  He weaved through the cluttered maze and only stopped when he heard the wet, slapping sound of chewing flesh.

Dammit.

Wayne’s 400-pound body lay on the floor. His black and white checkered pants, once covered in egg yolk and cooking grease, were soaked through with blood. His white t-shirt was pulled up over his head and three infected construction workers devoured his round belly. Dozens of bite marks dotted his pale flesh and the men clawed for larger chunks.

There was no sign of Nixon or the baby and Corey couldn’t help thinking Wayne had been a sacrificial lamb.

He considered for a minute, his debt to Nixon, which had more than been repaid.

“Help me!”

Fists pounded on the other side of a closed door and drew the horde’s attention. The three men abandoned Wayne’s lifeless body in favor of fresher meat.

“Somebody get me out of here!”

The panicked voice was Nixon’s.

Corey considered what it would mean to have him in
his
debt for a change and decided he liked the idea.

“Hey!” He shouted to distract the horde’s attention. “You looking for someone?” He tapped the sight on his pistol.

He landed a red dot square on the forehead of the nearest man to him and fired. The man went down, twitched, and became still. The noise drove the other two to move faster. One staggered more than the other and his foot dragged, causing him to weave back and forth. Corey had trouble keeping his aim and took him down with two shots. The third man was injured. He moved with an awkward tilt and left a trail of blood behind him. Corey aimed for a head shot, but the yellow hard hat on the infected man’s head protected his brain. He turned off the laser sight and tucked the pistol into his waist. He picked up a length of 2X4 and held it like a bat. A handful of nails stuck out the far end like a mace as though someone had fired a nail gun repeatedly into the scrap to clear a jam. “Hungry?” He choked up on the board and swung as hard as he could into the infected man’s head. The hard hat flew off and crashed against the wall. The man toppled and lay on his side on the floor. He moved to get up. With only one good leg, he couldn’t. Corey held the board over his head and brought it down with both hands, piercing the top of the man’s skull. His hands burned with splinters and blisters, but he continued the attack until the bone caved. It was a hard, but satisfying kill. He moved toward Nixon’s office with his gun drawn and fired a round into the top of Wayne’s head for good measure. Blood soaked the shirt covering his face and Corey, though never exactly a friend to Wayne, was thankful not to have seen it.

“Dr. Nixon, are you in there?” He pounded on the wrong closed door. “It’s okay to come out. They’re gone.”

The door, two down from him, opened and Nixon stumbled into the hall.

“Jesus, what happened to you?”

Blood dripped from a paper towel wrapped around his finger and sweat ran down his face. “You have to help me.” His vacant expression gave away his disorientation, though he kept his eyes turned away.

“Stop right there,” Corey said.

Nixon’s foot caught on one of the construction worker’s arms and he fell, hitting his knees. “Please, I need your help.”

Corey looked down at him and lifted his chin. A dull, white film formed over Nixon’s dark eyes.

“There’s no help for this,” he said and pressed the muzzle to Nixon’s forehead.