Plague Town (7 page)

The pain was totally worth it, though, once I took a swallow of cold ginger ale. The taste reminded me of childhood and being home sick, with my mom bringing saltines and glass after glass of soda to settle my stomach.

My mom...

Was this zombie thing happening all over the place, or just around Redwood Grove? My parents were up in Lake County. Would they be safe on their ranch?

I needed to call them, but my iPhone was gone, probably lying somewhere in the woods or the field, covered with blood and intestines. I fought the urge to leap out of bed, mainly because I’d likely collapse if I tried to do anything that quickly. So I pushed the blankets off me and very slowly and carefully swung my legs over the side of the bed, pausing to see what the rest of me thought of this movement.

My head felt a little woozy, and I doubted my bite wounds would like
anything
at this point, but... not too bad.

Better living through drugs.

Encouraged, I set my feet on the ground and stood up.

Whoah
. Suddenly I knew how Dorothy felt. I held onto the rickety metal bed frame and waited for things to stop spinning, or at least slow down a bit. Closing my eyes helped.

“What the
hell
are you doing out of bed?”

The voice came out of nowhere: male, angry and horrifyingly familiar. My eyelids flew open and I let out a startled yelp, letting go of the bed frame.

Bad move.

Things started to go gray and my knees went wobbly. My face and the floor were on a collision course, but strong arms stopped the fall just before impact, scooping
me up like I weighed five pounds instead of, well, whatever. My visitor carefully set me on the bed while cursing under his breath.

I lay there for a minute until I was sure I wasn’t going to pass out, and then took another look. I prayed this was just another nightmare, or the after-effects of the drugs.

Gabriel glared at me, arms folded. He wore green fatigues and a black T-shirt, and looked about ten pounds lighter than the last time I’d seen him. The weight loss didn’t harm his good looks; his cheekbones were more defined than ever.

“What are
you
doing here?” I said, shooting for authoritative. But my voice sounded feeble and kind of petulant, even to my own ears.

“Stopping you from falling flat on your face, it would seem,” he replied with that familiar holier-than-thou attitude. I would have rolled my eyes if I didn’t think it would hurt. Instead I settled for a glare of my own.

“I only fell because you startled me.”

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” Gabriel said as he plunked himself down in the room’s only chair. “Professor Fraser sent me to check on you.”

“But why are you dressed like Rambo?” The dizziness passed, and I started to sit up, only to have him put a restraining hand on my shoulder. He ignored my admittedly snarky question.

“You need to rest,” he said.

“I’ve been resting for...” Then I stopped, realizing I had no idea how long I’d been asleep. “Gabriel, I need to call my parents. I need to find out what happened to Matt. I need to find out what happened to
me
.”

An unreadable expression flashed across his face, but was quickly replaced by a stoic mask.

“No phones,” he said flatly.

“What do you mean, no phones?” I knocked his hand off my shoulder and struggled up to a sitting position. “There are
always
phones!”

“Not here, not now there aren’t.”

“That’s a shitty answer!”

“It’s all you’re going to get.” He crossed his arms again and stared straight ahead.

Bedside manner? Epic fail.

Maybe he’s pissy because Professor Fraser doesn’t let him call her Simone.
Whatever the reason, I matched him, glare for
son-of-a-bitch
glare until he stood up.

“I’m going to get the professor,” he said. “Now that you’re awake, she’ll want to talk to you.”

Way to pass the buck.

“Wait!” I said.

Gabriel paused, hand on the doorknob.

I opened my mouth to ask about Matt, but that wasn’t what came out.

“I need to use the bathroom.” Was it just the light or did Gabriel’s face just turn red?

Yup, definitely some embarrassment going on there.

“Professor Fraser said you needed to stay in bed.”

It was like talking to a call center in Bangalore. He couldn’t deviate from the script.

Resistance is useless...

“Look, that’s all well and good, but I need to pee, okay? Unless you have a bedpan handy, I really need to get to a bathroom—like
now.
”

Gabriel opened his mouth to argue, came to his senses and snapped it shut again without further discussion. When I started to stand up, he helped me to my feet. And for just a moment, the strength of his arm around my shoulders was a momentarily safe haven against the uncertainty rocking my world.

He opened the door and led me out into a hallway which was lit by the same unforgiving fluorescent bulbs. Down at one end a pair of double doors swung open and I could see the makeshift medical ward. People in hazmat suits and others dressed like Gabriel were bustling around, and a low hum of continual conversation was
clearly audible. I also heard moans, and some screams. Disturbing splashes of red were clearly visible on the floor and bedclothes.

“Come on.”

Gabriel steered me in the other direction. The hallway was lined with doors sporting little view-panels like the one in the door to my room. We reached the restrooms, clearly marked with the ubiquitous man-in-pants and woman-in-dress outlines. Gabriel stopped outside of the women’s room.

“Will you be okay on your own?” He sounded suspiciously sincere.

I nodded and stepped away from the security of his arm. I wobbled slightly, but used the door handle to steady myself before he could grab me again. I didn’t care if I passed out; no way was Gabriel coming in with me. There are some things a girl has to do on her own.

I did my business as quickly as possible and washed my hands thoroughly, as if to scrub away what had happened. Splashing water on my face, I made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror. A ghastly pale face with hollowed eye sockets stared back at me, total “heroin chic.”

The bandages on my shoulder were flecked with red at the point of the wound. Not too badly, though. Just a few dots of blood soaking through the gauze to remind me of what lay beneath.

I poked experimentally at the still pristine dressing covering my forearm.
Ouch!
Yes, it still hurt, but no blood came through. I flashed back to the moment when the fat zombie had sunk his teeth into my flesh. At the time it’d felt like he’d torn away half my arm, but maybe it wasn’t so bad.

I shivered, and noticed that my backside and legs were colder than the rest of me. That brought the realization I was wearing one of those flimsy hospital gowns that tied at the back, leaving the butt hanging out when the
two sides inevitably flapped open. And at some point or another someone had removed all of my clothes, leaving only my pink lace thong.

Great.

A fist pounded on the door, sending a surge of adrenaline through me.

“You okay in there?” Gabriel’s voice, sounding more impatient than ever.

Jeez frickin’ Louise, can’t a girl pee in private?

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Give me a sec.”

I had a perverse desire to take my sweet time. But I really needed to lie back down, so I stifled my petty impulse and rejoined Gabriel in the hall.

He put an arm around my shoulders again, but any hint of warmth was gone. If I hadn’t needed his arm for support, I would’ve shoved it off.

Before we reached my room, the double doors at the end of the hall crashed open and a gun-toting, hazmat-suit-clad soldier burst into the hallway. He called out to Gabriel.

“Captain! We have a situation!”

Captain?
Since when did a teacher’s aide earn a rank? I filed this away for later.

Gabriel’s arm immediately dropped from my shoulders.

“I’ll be right there.” He turned to me. “Ashley, go back to your room.” Not bothering to wait for an answer, he took off after the soldier, leaving me swaying unsteadily in the hallway.

I wanted to lie down, and really should have gone back to my room. But I’ve never been much for following orders, especially with so many questions left unanswered. So I waited a moment, and then followed him into the makeshift medical ward.

The screams I’d heard from the hallway hit me like a wave of sound the instant I slipped into the ward. Eerie moans echoed above the screaming, a real life chorus of the damned. The smell in the room was thick, coppery, and rancid. I did
not
want to know what the source was.

There were a dozen or so cots, all occupied by thrashing people. None of them looked good. Sallow, greenish-yellow skin tone, like jaundice with a bad case of mold. Blood and other fluids leaking from their mouths, noses, and ears. Some had raw wounds on their arms or legs while others had bandages seeping through with blood—or in some cases, nasty, foul-smelling blackish ooze. Most of them had restraints strapped across their arms, waists, and legs, along with metal collars around their necks. The straps were totally disturbing, and the collars were strangely decorated with a bunch of rings. It was just plain creepy.

There was a commotion at the far end of the room, lots of shouting and guys brandishing guns. Most of the hazmat brigade were down there, along with Gabriel. Like me, he wasn’t wearing protective gear.

I briefly wondered why, but then the woman in the cot nearest me started convulsing. Dark blood poured from her mouth and nose in scary quantities. Her eyes snapped open and for an instant we locked gazes. The
whites of her eyes looked like bloody egg yolks; sickly yellow streaked with red veins. Thick red tears oozed out from under her lashes and trickled down her face. She opened her mouth and croaked out something.

I think it was “Help me.”

Then a fresh flow of blood caused the words to rattle and distort in her throat.

“I... I’m sorry...”

I backed away from her, wanting only to escape from the horror of the moment. My legs hit cold metal and I nearly toppled back onto another cot, this one holding a skinny African-American kid covered in red-soaked sheets. His eyes and mouth gaped open, blood oozing thickly from the corners. I would have thought he was dead, except for the occasional tremor wracking his body.

Pressing a hand to my mouth to force back the bile rising in my throat, I stumbled to the middle of the room, trying not to look any more as my ears filled with the grotesque sounds of throats closing up, then vomiting out foul-smelling liquids.

Why isn’t anyone doing something for these people?

Someone at the far end of the room growled, and it was a guttural, feral sound. My attention snapped back there in time to see one of the hazmat guys raise his gun, tugging back on a lever that made a nasty
ch-chak
, like the noise a shotgun makes in the movies when they rack a shell into it.

“Hold your fire.” Gabriel barked the order in a tone that cut through the chaos. “Don’t shoot it. We need to contain as many of these specimens as possible.”

Specimens?

“Use the poles. Just keep away from its teeth.”

I slowly approached the cluster of soldiers and medics, and saw that one of the creatures was loose. He... it was wearing one of the collars. The soldiers had poles, about six feet in length with spring-loaded clasps on the ends. No one noticed me as two or three of them tried to
hook their clasps into one of the metal rings on the collar. The thing’s head was snapping from side to side, but I could see that he had once been a good-looking guy in his twenties. He wore the torn, bloody remnants of jeans and a white cotton, button-down shirt.

Wounds were visible through the shredded fabric, deep gouges in gangrenous sallow-green flesh.

“Matt...?”

My voice came out as barely a croak.

Matt’s head stopped moving as if my voice triggered an off switch. Everyone froze around him, seeming afraid that they would set him off again. Then he slowly turned to the side to stare at me with milky white pupils, the whites themselves yellowed and bloodshot.

One hand stretched out toward me and for a heartbeat I thought he recognized me. Then a feral snarl distorted his features and he...
it
lunged for me, mindless hunger the only thing evident in those dead eyes as it plowed unheedingly through the soldiers who stood between us.

A bolt of paralyzing grief hit me, so strong and painful that it felt as if someone plunged a knife into my chest. I just stood there as my now undead boyfriend knocked soldiers aside in a driving hunger for my flesh that had nothing to do with sex.

Zombie Matt’s fingers actually grazed my shoulders when one of the pole clasps suddenly snagged the collar around its neck, stopping it in its tracks. I looked up to see Gabriel holding the other end of the pole, muscles tensing as he fought to pull Matt away from me. Everyone else scattered as it bucked and lunged, hands grasping and slipping off hazmat suits, guttural moans and growls spilling out of its mouth along with that rank black fluid.

“Some help here!” Sweat poured off Gabriel’s brow.

Without thinking, I grabbed up one of the poles dropped by the soldiers and shoved the business end up against the ring on the other side of Matt’s collar. The
clasp opened and shut with a snap. The resulting jerk on my arms and shoulders nearly made me pass out. All that kept me upright was the knowledge that if I fainted, I would probably die.

Gabriel shot me an unreadable look.

“Someone grab that pole—
now!”
he barked.

Thankfully, someone grabbed the pole from my hands. Someone else caught me as I started a slow collapse to the floor.

This is getting monotonous,
I thought as everything faded to black.