Slow Burn: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

Both little girls shook their heads vigorously while looking at me with huge frightened eyes. Walking to the door, I listened hard. No sounds came from the other side so I opened it cautiously and stepped into the hallway. The girls followed as instructed, right on cue. I made for the way I entered the school when I remembered a side door leading outside on my way to the classroom.

We quietly negotiated the hallways, and I noticed some of the bodies that were sprawled out on the floor beginning to twitch. As we passed a few, a blonde teacher began to moan and claw her way up onto her hands and knees. Without altering my pace, I planted my size 11½ boot into her face as if I was kicking a field goal. With a bone shattering crack, the blonde literally flipped into the air and landed onto her back. Most of her front teeth were now scattered across the hallway, and her jaw appeared to be dislocated. Unfortunately, both girls picked that time to shriek at the top of their little six-year-old lungs. Howls and moans erupted all over the school followed by footsteps all rushing to our location.

I watched as several zombies around us clambered unsteadily to their feet. I shoved Lucy and her friend into an open doorway, followed them inside and slammed it shut. The room we found ourselves in was the teacher’s lounge, with a couch and table, along with pop and vending machines. A door on the other end of the room led out into a different wing of the school, but my door did not have a lock on it. Needing to slow down pursuit, I grabbed the edge of the nearest pop machine and, with considerable effort, managed to tip the machine over in front of the door we’d just come through. As the huge Coke machine crashed to the floor, the little girls once again took up their screaming sessions while several pairs of fists began pounding on the barricaded door.

“
Well that should slow them down.”

Turning back to the girls, I told Lucy to hold tight, for we needed to move fast. We ran out into the next hall, and I looked left to see that there were at least a dozen zombies shuffling down the hall directly towards us with many more pouring around the corner to join them. In the administrative offices to my right, the windows exploded with several creatures trying to claw their way through the shattered glass to get to us. That startled even me. For the moment, the hallway behind me was the only way open. I turned and dragged the girls with me to the end of the hallway to a T-intersection. To the right, scores of twitching bodies filled the hall. Thankfully, I saw an emergency fire exit dead ahead (no pun intended), and hollered for the girls to run for it. Spinning around, my balls shriveled tight when I saw the hallway was now packed shoulder to shoulder with hungry, disgusting, mutilated zombies all after one thing— my hot, gushing blood.

Desperately I swung my M4 rifle up and the orange triangle of my reflex scope stopped on the skull of the first creature coming at me.

Crack!

The sound of rifle fire in these tight confines was deafening, but so rapidly did I fire one round after another, that my rifle’s magazine ran dry in seconds. At least I could now use the second or two of borrowed time to reload as the zombies stumbled over the several fallen corpses, downed from well-placed headshots. I slapped the bolt home on my rifle, and like a video game gone bad, I burned through another thirty-round magazine in seconds. The smell of cordite in the air was overpowering and made me hack repeatedly.

Where in the hell could all of these zombies be coming from?

Sweat poured down my face as I slammed another magazine into my rifle, which was now hot to the touch. I continued wreaking havoc with head shots while I retreated back down the hall towards the door. Before I knew it, I backed up into the exit door. I figured the girls had enough of a chance to get out of harm’s way, and I turned and bolted out of the door. Next to the door lay a shovel some janitor had been using for landscaping in the nearby flowerbeds. Remarking how I thought I just shot what looked to be the janitor in the head, I grabbed it and jammed it through the door handles to prevent the zombies from following, for now at least. I ran to the front of the school, and at that second, it hit me like a truck that I had just sent a whole ambulance full of infected bite victims to the hospital from the domestic battery address across the street.

“
Son of a bitch!” My yell was dry and hoarse.

As I neared my squad, I didn’t see Lucy or her hot Latino mother anywhere. However, I didn’t see their bodies either, and nobody else was moving in the parking lot. Good. Hopefully they had found one another.

I didn’t have the time to worry about them right now. Tossing my rifle into the passenger seat of the squad, I fished my keys from my pocket and fired it up as the sound of breaking glass made me look up. Several zombies were now spilling out of the school into the parking lot.

“
Fuck this!” I decided. “I’m outta here!”

Tires squealed as I gunned the engine, heading for the hospital.

Mattie was bored. She was tired of sitting in this nearly soundproof hospital room babysitting Officer Sherman’s prisoner. She was sick of the damned moaning and growling the smelly prisoner made whenever she got too close to his hospital bed. If not for the leather restraints on his hands and feet, she was sure he would attack her again. The way he kept trying to bite her reminded her of an old ex-boyfriend.

It stunk like ass in there, and she thought he’d probably crapped his pants.

She stood and began to pace impatiently by the door. The man reacted to her sudden movement, thrashing on the bed, clacking his yellowed teeth together.

“
Yep, just like my ex-boyfriend,” she chuckled. “What a loser he turned out to be.”

She exited the small one bed room, closed the hospital room door with a giggle and took a deep breath of sterile air. Across from the room was the nurses’ station, where a group of them stood around talking.

“
Is it a full moon out there tonight?" one asked. "We’re bursting with people lined up out the door waiting for treatment.”

“
It looks as if the panic from this supposed flu epidemic is hitting us hard,” another commented.

This nurse was younger and seemed worried.

Mattie stretched her shapely arms over her head, and she heard a cart roll to a stop next to her.

“
I’m here to get a blood sample from the patient,” the young female tech said.

“
Have at it. Just be careful, he’s a biter,” Mattie cautioned her.

“
Oh great!” the tech replied, fanning the air with her hand as she entered the room. “Phew! And he soiled himself.”

Mattie left the tech to do her job and walked down a few rooms to see how Officer Sherman was holding up. Pushing the curtain to the side, she entered his room and looked at him lying on the bed with his eyes closed.

He looked like shit.

He was sweating feverishly, white as a ghost, and the bandage on his ribs where he’d been bitten was soaked with yellowish blood. Sherman cracked his eyes open at the sound of the curtain closing.

“
How are you holding up, Sherman?” she asked.

“
Not good,” he replied dryly. "My ribs hurt real bad where that guy bit me and the rest of my body feels like I was hit by a truck.”

Sherman looked down at his bandage and peeled it back to study the wound. The injury was nasty; the edges of the bite mark had angry red and black streaks radiating outward from it. If that wasn’t infection, she’d hate to see what was.

“
Great, I’ll probably get AIDS or some weird shit from that dude,” he groaned.

“
It doesn’t look good," Mattie admitted. "I’ll go grab the doctor.”

“
Gee, thanks for cheering me up," Sherman mumbled. "And can you bring me back some water? The medicine they gave me tasted like I ate a turd.”

Leaving the room a little worried for him, Mattie walked back to the nurses’ station where the on-duty ER doctor was talking to several nurses, detailing his orders for treatment of patients. Hospital staff rushed room to room, trying to get patients treated and the rooms cleared for the next in line.

Mattie waited quietly to the side for the doctor to finish his business before getting his attention. Finally the doctor finished, and as the nurses left to attend their orders, she grabbed the doctor’s sleeve before he could walk off.

“
Hey, Doc, sorry to bother you, but my friend Officer Sherman is not looking very good. He’s here for a bite wound to his ribcage and if anything, it looks much worse and very infected. He was only bitten an hour or so ago. Can you look at him real quick?”

“
Sorry, I’m swamped right now, Officer,” he replied, “but I’ll have a nurse see to him right away.”

True to his word, the man grabbed a passing nurse and told her to drop what she was doing and see to Sherman.

Sometimes it was a good thing being a cop. At least they got a little respect here.

Following the nurse into Sherman’s room, she watched her check his chart and then his vitals. The nurse had a worried look on her face, which got worse when she looked at the nasty injury on his ribs. Sherman had already dozed off.

“
How long ago was he bitten?” the nurse asked.

“
I believe it was over two hours ago, but less than three,” Mattie replied.

“
That cannot be right,” the nurse answered, now pointing at the streaks in the skin surrounding the gash. “This bite wound looks at least a week old, maybe older. It is seriously infected and is spreading outwards throughout his body.”

The monitors that were hooked up to Sherman began beeping at a crazy fast rate. The nurse ordered her out of the room and slammed her fist onto the emergency button, which signaled to all workers in the ER that a patient was in distress. Stumbling backward, Mattie got out of the way of responding personnel. She did not believe that Sherman could be in mortal danger. She had witnessed the minor bite wound when it happened and had decided that it had to be an allergic reaction to the meds or something. She walked back to the prisoner’s room, and when she neared the door, it burst open with. The tech that had come to collect the blood sample was leaving the room, holding one hand in the other, swearing loudly. “Officer, you need to handcuff him to the bed. He broke a leather wrist restraint and grabbed me as I was drawing his blood. Then the smelly fucker bit my hand!” she cried, showing Mattie her bleeding palm.

“
I’ll document it in my report. It’ll just be another in a long line of charges he’ll have,” Mattie replied. “You had better clean that wound. My partner was bitten by this dirt bag and he is sicker than a dog now, and that was within a couple hours.”

“
Oh, that’s just great to hear,” she snapped as she stalked away.

Inside the room, Mattie could see that her prisoner indeed had broken a restraint and was trying to free himself. Pulling out her cuffs, she slapped one onto his free wrist and with considerable effort, secured it to the bed rail while taking care to stay clear from his gnashing teeth. In a fit of rage, she whipped the pillow out from under his head, glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was looking and whispered to the prisoner, “This is for Sherman.”

She placed the pillow over his head and rapidly punched him hard three times in the face through the pillow. Feeling better, she tossed the pillow onto the floor and took satisfaction seeing the man’s nose was now bent across his face.

It served him right! If you were going to act like an asshole, you shouldn’t be surprised when you got hurt.

As focused as Mattie was, she neither noticed nor heard the shouts of alarm. Outside the room, hospital staff were scurrying to several rooms where patients had simultaneously begun to convulse with unexplained seizures. In the reception area, a few people waiting to be seen began to fall to the ground as well, shaking with full blown convulsions – at least a dozen people in all. Mattie's prisoner began his annoying moaning again and grinding his teeth. She was a bit worried how she was going to explain the obvious broken nose, but was also wondering why he was not bleeding one bit from it. Faint screams pierced the room, finally grabbing her attention. Looking out the inset window in the door through the blinds, she observed a nurse who had been treating Sherman run past her room drenched in blood.

“
What the hell?”

Opening the door, she saw the curtain to Sherman’s room blast backwards as two hospital staff fell out of the room onto the hospital hallway floor. The man on the bottom futilely fighting back was the doctor. The man on top was Sherman, who was still in his hospital gown with his jaws locked onto the doctor’s throat.

“
Sherman! What the fuck are you doing?!?” Mattie screamed.

Sherman’s head whipped up and with a face drenched in blood, eyes wild with rage, let out an unholy scream. Sherman jumped to his feet and ran at her. Not prepared for that reaction, Mattie jumped back into the prisoner’s room and slammed the door shut just as Sherman reached it. She watched from the inside as he bashed into the door, just inches away from her. Praying fervently that the window did not break as her blood drenched coworker screamed and howled on the other side, she struggled mightily to hold the door shut. She met his eyes and could not see one bit of humanity in his baleful glare. Sherman’s head snapped around when a nurse ran past. His hand whipped out and latched onto the terrified woman, dragging her to the ground, tearing at her arms and face as she tried to shield herself.