Dead Again (10 page)

They continued moving down Main Street. Peterson could tell that this was the center of a once-wealthy suburban town. But now, it looked like the aftermath of an unnatural war. The street and sidewalks were littered with abandoned cars. A Mercedes Benz was turned on its side, a Lexus was on fire, and as far as the eye could see, there was wreckage of passenger vehicles.

And all the dead bodies--the corpses of policemen, paramedics, women, men, babies--the entire town’s population seemed to be spread out and dead. The stench of death was heavy in the air.
 
And the horrible gore--intestines, severed arms and legs, heads, every body part imaginable--littered everywhere. Nothing was alive here anymore. Everybody other than the fifty or so civilians at Peterson’s back, had faced a hideous, gruesome death.

Surveying the haphazard and chaotic wreckage, Peterson realized that when catastrophe strikes, people die in the most peculiar ways, and the living can behave in ways which are equally as shocking. When panic sinks in, nothing is out of the question. Peterson was still alive, in part, because he understood this fine point. In these times, he realized, people can be equally as dangerous as the dead, and he had to be darn careful of both.

Peterson kept an eye on the rest of the team: Sharon, Johnny-Boy, Angelo and Cash, all holding up the flanks. Sharon noticed Peterson looking at her, and she gave the “okay” sign.
 
 

In front of Peterson, from behind a stalled Mini Cooper, an infected woman appeared. “Putrid, stinking motherfuckers,” came a grunt from Armstrong, under his breath, as he walked up to the infected woman. He stopped just feet in front of her and shot a round point blank, hitting her matted, greasy head. The gleaming bullet split the woman’s skull right down the center. Bone chips splintered and dots of blood speckled Armstrong’s face.

“What are you stupid, Armstrong?” grunted Peterson. Armstrong was one bald, muscle bound motherfucker, and the last person on earth one would want to call stupid. But Peterson was the only man on earth who could get away with it.

“What?” replied Armstrong, playing dumb as he simultaneously wiped the blood from his face.

“You know what will happen if you get that blood in your eyes or mouth?” exclaimed Peterson. “You’re acting like you want to get infected. Put on your gas mask if you insist upon doing shit like that,” Peterson ordered.

Appearing like a specter behind Armstrong was another walking dead.
 
This female infected was full frontal naked and, in the most perverted sense, beautiful. The zombie’s toned body said that this was once a woman any man would be lucky to screw. Now she was a walking corpse. Her skin was an impossible, unnatural grey, and her sunken, shark-like eyes were without a soul. She was fucking dead. . .and she was walking.

She almost looks alive,
thought Peterson. He signaled to Armstrong, who spun around fast and was ready to fire, but Cowboy beat him to it. The gun blast from Cowboy’s elephant killer connected with the zombies neck, severing her head clean off her shoulders. It took a moment, and then blood jetted out of her neck socket like it was shot from a garden hose. The headless corpse kept walking, however, as if it needed time to catch up with the fact that it no longer had a head. Then, it collapsed.

“Where did she come from?” Armstrong said, as he wiped sweat from his forehead.

But the eyes on the decapitated head, now on the ground, moved and looked around. The damn head was still alive.

“It’s not dead yet!” Peterson said, stunted.

Armstrong turned and looked, “Oh, man. You gotta be kiddin me.”

“When they said destroy the brain, they weren’t kidding,” mused Peterson.

And with a burst of rage, Armstrong brought his foot down on the head, flattening it with a disturbing crunch. The job seemed done, but the face moved again, not willing to give in. Armstrong lost his cool and slammed down his foot again, and again, and again, until grey matter finally oozed out of the skull. The brain finally destroyed, the head stopped moving—this time, for good.

Armstrong wiped his bloody boot on the ground, like he’d just stepped in dog shit. His last bit of mental and physical energy drained, he let out a deep, tired breath.

Desensitized to the gruesome scene, Peterson turned toward the horizon, as he continued trotting with the rest of the group down Main Street.

“It’s getting dark again, Armstrong. We’re in for another fucking night,” Peterson spoke almost to himself as he gazed at black plumes of smoke, rising from a great distance away, as if an enormous fire had engulfed the forest. Unfortunately, it was not a forest. Peterson became stern and clenched his jaws tight.
 
He was looking in the direction of New York City.

“We can’t keep going like this, boss,” Armstrong said, trotting alongside him. “I’m tired. Not to mention, hungry and thirsty. We’ve had one good stroke of luck after another, but it has to run out sooner or later.” Armstrong got serious. For all of his bravado, he also had no-nonsense survival instincts. “Liberty to speak freely, Commander,” Armstrong said.

Peterson didn’t make eye contact and just kept looking at the burning horizon. He knew this was coming.

“Permission granted.”

 
“With all due respect, Commander, I believe our mission has been compromised,” Armstrong spoke in a low tone, so the others could not hear.

Peterson was ready for it, but pretended to ignore Armstrong’s statement. He raised his hands and the group stopped running.
“What’s up Commander?” Sheriff Jones asked.

“Give em’ one hundred and twenty seconds to catch their breath.” Peterson said, motioning to the civilians.

Peterson pulled the remains of a cigar out of his front pocket and lit it up. He blew smoke out slowly and, for a moment, looked as if he were a part of the burning horizon.

Peterson never really ignored a person, sometimes he just had the tendency to think for a while before responding. He knew this bothered Armstrong. Still, to some, it seemed a bit
self righteous
.
 

“The hospital might be a hell-hole,” Peterson said, finally. “But if we make it into the shelter, these people will be able to hold up a while. So will we. We can stay the night there, at least.”

Armstrong looked west to the setting sun, and east at a darkening sky, “Doesn’t seem like we have much of a choice. The hospital is just a good a bet as anywhere, I guess.”

Peterson broke his gaze away from the smoking horizon. With sadness, he reached into his front pocket and pulls out dog tags—they belonged to Ishmael and Spooky.

Peterson turned the dog tags in his fingers. “I will make sure their deaths mean something.” Peterson put his hand on Armstrong’s shoulder, and tried to fortify his resolve. “We’re not losing, not as long as we’re still breathing.”

However, as he looked out upon the street, death and destruction littered everywhere, and he couldn’t help thinking.
Maybe Armstrong’s right

But Peterson wouldn’t let this thought fester. He always tried to speak himself out of defeatist ideas. “I know our mission has been compromised, and I know you want to scuttle the job, but it’s all we have left. Either we accomplish this mission, as unlikely it may seem now, or die trying.”

Armstrong wasn’t about to give up so easily. “We’re far away and far behind.
 
We never knew if Dr. Winthrop was alive to start with, sir. Our window of opportunity has shut.”
Peterson could always read Armstrong’s mind, and right now he knew what Armstrong was thinking. He knew he was wondering: is it really worth it?

The callous answer was Yes. The mission was worth it. Dr. Winthrop’s life was worth that of a thousand soldiers, and even a thousand other scientists. Not everybody is created equal, and somewhere deep down inside, in the current of Armstrong’s subconscious, Peterson knew he felt this indignity.

But Peterson saw the big picture, in large part because he was granted permission to read classified files which Armstrong was not. Peterson had a glimpse of just how powerful Dr. Winthrop’s mind was, and how important he could be in fighting this unnatural war. Dr. Winthrop was a torch, where only blackness otherwise existed.

Armstrong continued, “and what happens when we don’t roll in with the Cavalry, boss? When just our team goes limping in. Then what do we do? Where do we go? The world has fucking collapsed.”

“I don’t have all the answers. I just know what must be done.” Peterson’s conviction was always amazing, one of his great strengths. In situations where other men crumbled, by sheer force of will and faith, Peterson always seemed to find the eye of the needle.
 
He was hope where hope had no right existing—and he had proven this to Armstrong again and again.
 

“Well, I’m having a hard time seeing the justice in it,” Armstrong concluded with an unusually disobedient tone. . .of which Peterson took note.

*

After about half a mile, they cleared Main Street, and they all followed Sheriff Jones as he turned down a wide boulevard. This boulevard was pretty empty of infected, too. Peterson took out the occasional zombies as he went, as did the others.

Five blocks later, Sheriff Jones, breathing very hard, stopped at an intersection.

“To your right,” Jones said, unable to catch his breath.

There, in the distance, Peterson saw it: the hospital. It was a huge, brick structure, impossible to miss. “Get everybody in formation,” Peterson ordered Armstrong and Sheriff Jones.

“The entranceway and parking lot look good,” Sheriff Jones’s voice cracked as he made this observation. “But there are going to be a hell of a lot of crawlers inside. We may be heading out of the frying pan into the fire.”

Peterson shot him a look. “Just do as I ordered and get the civilians ready.”

Johhny
-Boy edged up to the Sheriff with a sly smile, and gave him a rib, “Never say something like that before a battle, sheriff. It brings bad luck.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Moving in point-lock step, with trained precision, the shadow team led the way. Straight down the throat of the devil, running up the driveway which led to the front entranceway of the hospital. A big sign which read “emergency” hung above the plated glass doors.

A four story institutional building with an American flag on the lawn was this town’s excuse for a hospital. On the fourth floor some windows were black, charred and hollow. A fire obviously ate through a part of the building. The first floor, though, appeared intact. Dead bodies were scattered all over the hospital grounds.

Peterson felt something wrong in his gut. There were too few infected in this area.

It wasn’t long before they arrived at the front entranceway. A few zombies, which had collected at the front, turned and began moving toward the group.

A volley of gun shots rang out behind Peterson, and the infected fell.

Peterson stopped before the main entrance, breathing heavy from all the jogging.

“Now what?” Trooper Willis asked with his typical argumentative tone of voice, appearing behind Peterson.

Peterson stared at the entrance, feeling a familiar bad feeling. It felt like an ambush.

 
He spoke up. “My team will go in first and clear the emergency room. Cover the civilians here. When you hear the ALL CLEAR, get your asses inside.”

The shadow team moved in precision, by the numbers, and strategically positioned themselves for an assault into the emergency room. Sheriff Jones provided a few shots, hitting some far away zombies.

“GO!” ordered Peterson.

They all rushed into the emergency waiting room. It was surprisingly small. A few infected seemed almost surprised by their sudden appearance, and turned to attack. There weren’t many of them, however.
 
Johnny-Boy and Sharon fired, and easily dropped them.

“I don’t see anymore!” Sharon yelled.

“Cover the corners, east and west!” Peterson yelled back, using his hands to signal positions.

The team fanned out and covered corridors leading into the waiting room. Peterson went to the entranceway.

“SECURE!” he yelled outside to the group.

Peterson turned and saw all the civilians rush into the waiting room.
 
The sound of the mayhem drowned out his thoughts. The hospital had seemed like the best idea at the time. Available medicine, food, and enough space to make sure everyone had safety. During crises, it’s the focal point of most neighborhoods, after all. And if help was going to come, the hospital was the first place search and recovery units looked.

Now, cramped inside the small lobby, there was not as much room to maneuver as Peterson had expected there to be. Also, as Peterson surveyed the civilians, he noticed clearly that the trip here had taken its toll on the women, elderly and children especially, who seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
 

A particularly high-pitched scream came out of somewhere. The crowd of civilians screamed, then swayed.

Peterson was pushed, and practically lost his balance. On the east side of the lobby, a woman with dyed blond hair and a large chest stood before a set of double doors, which were being opened by a zombie. She was petrified by the sight before her.
 

This infected was once a hospital patient, and it wore a blood stained robe. What was most scary, however, was that, like a dog, it held a human bone between its teeth.
 

Appearing over the woman’s shoulder, Cash caught sight of something which created excitement in his face. Behind the incoming zombie, down the long hospital corridor from which it came, were countless more zombies moving towards them. The walking dead broke into a chorus of hair-raising moans.

Peterson watched as exhilaration swept across Cash’s face. Anytime Cash seemed happy, there was big trouble in the area. Yet, when the dead walked the earth, a crazy, dull witted, killing machine, like Cash, was an important addition to any team.

Cash raised his assault rifle with one hand while simultaneously brushing the woman aside with the other.

“Excuse me kindly, ma’am,” Cash said in a hospitable and gentlemanly tone of voice.

He then peered down the rifle’s sight, and put his crosshairs on the forehead of an incoming zombie, now only a few feet away. Cash gently tapped the trigger and a single crack from his rifle rung out. His bullet entered through the bridge of the zombie’s nose, and exited swiftly out the back of its head. The neck of the zombie snapped back with the force of the blow, and then fell on its back with a loud thud. The double doors swung closed behind it.

Cash yelled, “we have incoming, and lots of them!”

At Cash’s words, the civilian crowd began to panic.

As if they weren’t already scared enough,
Peterson thought. He noted again the limited space available to maneuver in here, and realized that this was the last thing they needed.

“You said this place would be safe!” an anonymous, high-pitched voice rang out.

“We’re trapped in here!” another voice rang out.

The civilians were losing faith. They were exhausted and petrified, but without their control and cooperation, this mission would turn into disaster quickly.

The Sheriff doubled back and made his way to Peterson.

“You and your men barricade the front entranceway,” the Sheriff said. “My men will establish a perimeter and keep them off you long enough.”

Peterson scanned the crowd as the Sheriff was speaking. He looked out the main entranceway windows: in such a short period of time, the infected had already materialized outside in mass.
 
The parking lot was filling up with zombies. They were surrounding and closing in on the hospital.

“Let’s go!,” the Sheriff said, still unable to catch his breath. “We don’t have much time!”

“No. We don’t need to barricade the hospital,” Peterson finally replied. In contrast to the Sheriff’s fearful face, Peterson was stern, as hard as a rock. His thoughts were lucid, his voice confident. “We agreed upon the shelter. That’s
were
we are going. We have to get these people in order. We’re going to need them going to get things done.”

Trooper Willis appeared before them. “I don’t know about you,” he interjected, “but I’m not going to be trapped down in that old shelter with no way out. It’s suicide.”

“The Trooper’s right,” the Sheriff said, trying to pull his eyes off the growing crowd of zombies in the parking lot. “We have to barricade this whole damn place.”

“That was not the plan,” Peterson snapped. This was no time for negotiation.

 
Trooper Willis inched towards Peterson’s face. “That wasn’t
your
plan. But you’re not in charge here anymore.
Your
not going to just lock these civilians down there and leave them to rot, soldier. What do you think we are, idiots?”

Peterson stared back hard, contemplating his options.

“There are two main entranceways and a door which leads to the loading dock,” came the voice of Nurse Dee. There was resilience and toughness in her voice. “That makes a total of three ways for those things to get in.”

“How many patients did this place hold?” Peterson asked.

“We have one hundred and forty five beds. We were full to capacity when things went bad.” She spoke in rapid fire, not wasting any time.

“That means we probably got a shitload of infected in here, like we warned,” Trooper Willis said to Peterson with a vicious stare. “Which is why we didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

“And that’s exactly why we can’t barricade this whole place, either,” retorted Peterson. He was doing his best to remain calm, but his voice raised just a notch. Trooper Willis was getting dangerously under his skin.
 

“We don’t need to lock the whole place down, boy, only the first floor,” Willis snapped.

“We are heading to the shelter,” Peterson decided, ignoring the Sheriff and Trooper Willis. “Nurse Dee, are you all right to lead the way?”

“No, disobey that order Nurse!” Sheriff
 
Jones hissed through clenched teeth. Previously cooperative, his sudden change was an unpleasant shock to Peterson. “We needed your help in that parking lot, Commander. Thank you. Now that we are out, I’m no longer taking orders from you.”

The crackle of machine gun fire suddenly rang out. Peterson whirled his head to see Cash popping off rounds. Obviously, there was some bad company moving in on Cash’s position.

Then there came a shout from the other side of the lobby, “INCOMING!”

It was Armstrong, holding his pistol in hand. About ten feet before him was a walking dead, a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck. Large chunks of flesh were bitten off his neck, exposing his
adam’s
apple. Armstrong took quick aim and popped a round through the doctor’s head.

“And I got a lot more behind him!” Armstrong hollered.

From the opposite side of the lobby, Sharon’s voice came. “Get down!” Peterson just had time to see a group of civilians duck, revealing a walking corpse coming upon them. Sharon was on top of it, however, her MP5 assault rifle tucked tightly in firing position. Flashes spit from her barrel as she fired a cascade of bullets.

The grouping was perfect. Three 9 mm rounds hit the corpse squarely in the side of the head, taking apart its skull. Blood showered the nearby civilians. The zombie fell, revealing an army of infected just behind it. More unearthly moans of the walking dead filled the lobby.

A civilian cried out, “They are fucking everywhere!”

The townspeople, in unison, screamed in panic.

“We don’t have time to argue Sheriff,” Peterson demanded, with a pressured tone of voice. “First things first, get everyone to safety, in the shelter. Will you help me or not?”

The Mayor had overheard the conversation. He stepped forward, his voice trembled and his eyes watered with fear, “Listen to him Sheriff. For God’s sake, listen to him. He got us this far.”

Sheriff
 
Jones turned to Peterson, his voice hard. “We don’t take orders from you anymore.” He swung over to Trooper Willis, his mind made up. “We barricade this damn placed first.”

Sudden bursts of machine gun fire crackled from all sides of the perimeter. The shadow team was now engaged with swarms of incoming infected.

The Sheriff turned to address the crowd. He was about to say something to the civilians, but Peterson pushed him aside.

Peterson spoke: “Listen up people. Stay calm and do exactly as I say. Stay tight, stay close, don’t push and move swiftly. We’re going into the shelter now.”

“Don’t listen to him!” Sheriff Jones shouted.

Another particularly loud shriek caught Peterson’s attention. From the looks of the situation, the zombie must have attacked from behind the reception desk. It had taken hold of a woman’s arm, and was chewing a mouthful of her flesh. She attempted to pull her arm away, but to no avail.

From the midst of the crowd, Cowboy jumped out with his 8 gauge shotgun in his arms. At point blank range, he pulled the trigger. BLAM.

The retort of the rifle was deafening. The powerful weapon just didn’t blow the entire head off the zombie, it also blew the woman’s hand off. A pulsating stream of blood sprang out of the hole where her hand used to be. She was too stunned to scream.