Medora: A Zombie Novel (6 page)

Only five employees had remained at the advertising firm. Keith, Dave, a young internist, a skinny accountant and a middle-aged receptionist with red hair. All were bound together by the guilt of leaving a sick person alone, locked in a room. No ambulance had ever come and 911 wasn't responding to calls. They sat together around the bleak break room eating whatever lunch anyone had left over. There wasn't fear in their hushed conversations but impatient boredom. Strangely, the Mayor's face on the screen announcing a state of emergency had helped solidify the intangible fear they had into a solid lump of acceptance that they could more easily manage because it was less vague than the phantoms of precarious panic that lingered in their minds. They took comfort in the fact that fear loses its force when it has the consent of the majority.

Keith sat up from a forced conversation with the receptionist and walked ove
r to the conference room where Janice was held. He looked into the darkness and could make out her pasty arm lying under the table. He knew what it meant. She was dead. He sighed and licked his lips, tasting the salty perspiration from his mouth. He took off his tie and started to wrap it around his nose like a surgical mask.

“
Hey, Dave? Can you come over here?”

Dave walked up and
choked at the smell that was now easily diffusing from the conference room and had filled up the entire work floor.

“We have to go in there
. I think she's dead. I can see her lying on the floor under the table, not moving at all.” Dave sighed heavily not knowing if it was from the prospect of Jane death or disposing of her body. He looked at the tie wrapped around Keith's face and would have laughed at him if he didn't find himself doing the exact same thing.

Keith moved the filing cabinets from the door and slowly turned the handle. He held his breath, knowing that his tie was not enough to stop the smell. When he breathed in, the stench turned to a palpable presence in his mouth where his senses no longer distinguished between smell and taste. He clutched the frame of the door and vomited on the carpet.
Ignoring the vomit, he turned on the lights, but a flash of sparks spewed from the socket in the ceiling. Janice had apparently broken the light bulbs. The overhead projector that had earlier been used to display cough syrup animations was crushed and broken apart from its casing on the floor. There were small standing pools of blood and fluid throughout the room giving it the appearance of the workshop of a butcher.

He slowly crept u
p, hunched over, to approach the table. “Janice, can you hear me? It's Keith. I want to see how you're doing.” He could only see her arm extending from underneath the table. He slid his foot under and nudged her pudgy hand with his foot. There was something entirely peculiar about how the arm shook from his nudge. It rocked back and forth like a piece of driftwood bobbing carelessly in a lake. It moved too easily given the small force with which he pushed it. Before he could understand the implications, he saw Janice fall toward him from a dark corner in the room. She collapsed into his chest, her face exploding with fluid and pus onto his shirt and into his face and eyes. He fell into a chair with Janice's swollen head digging into his chest. Lifting her head up, she started to bite at the air. Her mouth had become the only recognizable orifice on her face.

Dave
stumbled from behind. His body twisted so quickly around the chair that Keith was sitting in that one of his shoes flipped off and flew into the air. Dave pulled at Janice's shoulders from behind and lifted her bloody, cauliflower face off of Keith. They then realized their mistake in entering the room. They saw that Janice's arm had been crudely gnawed at the bicep and what they thought was Janice lying dead under the table was her decapitated arm. The stump that she had chewed at had ragged muscle and tendons swinging in the air, flipping droplets of blood in every direction. Dave pushed her to the ground as Keith quickly placed both his feet on her face and pushed off in the rolling chair, propelling him toward the door. Sitting on her knees, she started to pump her remaining arm into the air in a futile attempt to land a blow. They could see a necrotic and eroded wound on her arm where she had started to chew through as well. Dave ran from the room and slammed the door behind him.

“Okay, okay. This is beyond anything... That can't happen. These things don't happen in the real world.” Keith was catching his breath and watching Janice from the
windowpane.

“She gnawed it off! Her entire arm!
Holy shit how could someone chew through their entire arm?” Dave began pacing the carpet. “Let’s get out of here, man!”

Keith's
mind jumped quickly to the enormous amount of infected pus and blood that was covering his face. A cold panic had grasped him telling him to wipe his face with anything possible. Shoving his hand in his shirt in between the buttons, he ripped it open. The buttons flew off in all directions, ricocheting off the glass window. He took it off and shoved his face into the crumpled up shirt, rubbing it up and down his eyes and nose. He then ran to the bathroom down the hall and scrubbed his face with hot water and soap.

When the other employees in the break room saw him running past with his face wrapped up in his
shirt, they put down the coffee they were casually sipping on and burst out into the office. They turned to Dave who was leaning against a table with his tie wrapped around his face. The red haired receptionist looked at him and spoke up. “What happened?”

Dave took the tie from his face. “I'm
sorry, but Janice is gone. That's it; we all need to go home, right now.”

“Gone? Is she... dead... in there?” Her frightened eyes started to bob in the direction of the conference room.

“No, she's not dead, but there is nothing we can do for her now. She is sick beyond anything you've ever seen. Janice isn't Janice anymore. We don't need to wait for an ambulance, because they couldn't do anything anyway.”

Keith silently walked up to the room with disheveled hair and a red face. “Okay everybody, there's nothing else to do for Janice
. We should all go home now.” The fact that Keith and Dave said almost identical words to them after leaving the conference room with Janice made them queasy with dread. They immediately became suspicious knowing that something had occurred which made Dave and Keith mutually vote on going home with no further discussion. They also realized that they were not going to discuss whatever it was that happened.

“
Well, I don't know if the buses are still going or the subway, but they probably are. Does everyone have a ride home? Dave and I are driving together and we can take someone with us.” As he talked, he made his way to the windows of the building and looked down into the streets. He saw swarms of people walking on the sidewalks. Traffic was at a complete halt and he dreaded the thought of waiting in traffic for hours to get home. “Looks like we're going to have a lot of traffic to deal with down there.” He flipped open his phone and called Ellen. The only answer was a loud obtrusive beeping on the line, which then hung up.

The five remaining employees collected their briefcases and
purses, and walked past the empty receptionist desk. Keith looked up at the TV and saw an emergency broadcast streaming over the screen. He chose to ignore the thoughts that started to climb into his consciousness and began to think about seeing his wife and daughter. He remembered his busted up front door that he had to fix this weekend and the gasoline stains on his driveway that he promised Ellen he was going to scrub.

His mind was harrowed up in the menial tasks of his daily life when he opened the door to the stairway and now gazed at the m
enacing face of his nightmares. He didn't see the real life nightmares of terminal cancer, death of a child, divorce or lawsuits. He saw the actual nightmares of his sleeping dreams at night that twisted with the sickening horror of sweaty panic and demented surrealism that made a man leap from his pillow. He saw faces of disease and death climbing the staircase towards him and smelled their stench of sweet rotting meat. For the first time, he knew what panic in a man's heart felt like and the awful sense of being trapped with no defense, no strategy and no hope. He felt the entire height of nine floors below him and imagined every physical way that he could descend them without using the stairs.

He stared down the flight of stairs before him and saw the unmistakable
sickness, which had claimed Janice. The stairs were crowded with men and woman, walking limply, and weakly grasping the rails to climb up. They were just starting to approach the staircase that led up to the ninth floor. Some of their faces had been imploded with a crater of pus while others had maintained a better semblance of their faces but suffered in other aspects of their bodies. Some of their arms were bloated with blisters and dripping blood. One woman was crawling up the stairs with one arm clutching the rail while her other arm, missing a hand, was being used to support her weight as she climbed. Her scalp and hair had slid downward off her skull and were hanging precariously from the side of her head. As a collective group, they gushed bodily discharge and blood onto the concrete stairs as they slowly moved like slugs, constantly secreting mucous as they inch along the sidewalk. With their slow movements, they wouldn't have seemed so menacing to Keith if it weren’t for what he had already experienced with his former boss.

The small group of employees behind Keith stared in silent horror and waited for a few more moments to register what they were seeing before panic set into their minds. Before anyone could audibly scream, Keith pushed them backwards and slammed the door to the stairway sh
ut. A loud clap erupted in his ears, silencing and almost removing the image of what was behind the door completely from his memory.

Keith wiped the corners of his mouth with his hand and started to
breathe heavily. He looked at Dave and spoke to everyone. “We have to find another way out of here right now. They're all sick, just like Janice. They're sick and dangerous and we can't go that way.”

The red haired receptionist started to
breathe erratically and dropped her handbag on the floor, spilling its contents. She ran to the elevators and started to push the up and down buttons like a child first discovering the elevator.

“No, no, we can't use the elevators! It's too dangerous. What if they're broken?” Keith stumbled slowly back into the main work floor of the offices. “Let's get to the other stairwell
and hope it’s clear.”

The group clamored together and swiftly made their way across the work floor. No one said a word as they moved. They could see the exit sign around the corner to the other stairwell. They could also see the exit doors as they slammed open while several infected people stumbled inward, toppling over one another. They saw the stairwell crammed with the sick, forcing their way through the
doorframe, coughing and hacking at infection in their throats. They would have streamed onto the work floor more quickly but they were falling over one another, creating a dam of human bodies preventing the entry of more people. The florescent lighting of the office made their faces shine with moisture.

The employees stopped, frozen in movement and thought. They knew it was panic time. So they panicked.

The redhead kicked off her high heels and ran into a nearby office slamming the door behind her. The accountant and internist ran after her, ripped the door open and disappeared into the room. Keith's mind flashed forward to an imaginary near future of the five of them trapped in a tiny room trying to ward off an innumerable concourse of walking disease with no food or help for at least the next twenty-four hours. The biological response that flickers within a person when faced with bodily destruction was coursing its way into his pumping heart and electrifying his nerves. The instinct flowing in his bones and muscles told him to run, to run and forget about everyone else. He momentarily cringed at what his nerves were saying to his muscles. Keith looked at Dave, then they mutually began to run the opposite direction right back towards the stairwell that they first tried to descend. They approached it and could see that the sick people on that end hadn't managed to get the door open. Stopping to look back, they could see dozens of infected people slowly trickling into the room. They stumbled over one another and fell, hitting themselves on desks and chairs.

Keith feared it would be only minutes before they started to flood the room like a single drop of red dye infiltrating a bowl of water, slowly but effectively diffusing through the entire room. “This is the only way down. Maybe we can squeeze between them. They might not attack us if we don't bother them.”

“Did you see Janice in there? She attacked you on sight! That staircase is full of them! It's not happening. Let’s just keep moving upward. We can make it to another floor and wait it out. I'm sure there are riot police everywhere taking care of these crazy sons of bitches.” Dave was panting heavily. “We can…” He bent over to put his head between his knees. “I don’t think I can handle this, man. I’m losing it.”

“
Just stop panicking. I’ve got an idea.” Keith walked over to a large glass coffee table, grabbed two legs between his forearms and chest, and lifted it up. “We might need this to get them back.” Keith looked at Dave, his hair now free from the confines of hair gel, swinging loosely above his eyes giving him an adolescent appearance. “Are you ready? Let's just knock them down first and then haul our asses up the stairs.”