Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (9 page)

It was a suck plan, but our choices were sucky or shit. You take what you can get.

Thirty minutes after my arrival on the twelfth floor, the flow of infected climbing up out of the elevator shafts had slowed to a trickle. Most were exiting on the tenth floor, drawn by the ecstatic howls advertising the feast below. I peeked down both shafts to confirm that. There was light coming in from some open doors twelve floors down and light from the open doors near the top, but most of the shaft was hidden in deep shadow. Any part of the walls illuminated with dispersed light was covered with fearless White climbers. The bottoms of both shafts were covered with the dead and those among the Whites who were happy to eat their own.

Having done my final check of the shafts, I hurried back around the corner to where everyone and everything was staged. Dr. Evans and Sergeant Dalhover looked at me with expectant eyes. “Last chance guys. Are we doing this? If not, I’ll go out by myself or with whoever else wants to chance it.”

“I don’t expect more than half of us to make it, and that’s if we get lucky,” Dr. Evans said. He was back to being detached, efficient Evans. His analysis was probably right.

I looked at Dalhover. In his flat, gravelly voice he said, “Everybody’s in. They all see where this is going to end if we stay.”

“Then we run for it,” I pasted on my best fake smile. “Running has worked for me more times than I can count.”

Dr. Evans turned to the survivors arrayed by the wheeled hospital beds up the hall. He yelled, “Does everyone know what to do?”

Only silent, stern faces looked back. Heads nodded.

I looked for Steph’s face in the hall. Our eyes met. Hers were red from crying over Jeff. She wouldn’t allow anyone to shoot him, and she wouldn’t leave him at the nurse’s station. I’d given her a hand moving him into a small storage room near the end of the main hall. She locked the door from the inside and left him there. Sure, there was a chance he’d awaken in a day or two as a slow burn, like me, but…

“If anyone gets separated from the group, you’re on your own,” Dr. Evans said. “We can’t go back and look for you. We’ll have to presume that you’re dead. Stay together.”

No response from the group. No questions.

We all stood in an awkward moment of silence, readying ourselves to rush into death’s greedy maw.

Dalhover’s gruff voice snapped everyone’s attention forward, not because it carried, but because they were used to listening to it and he was used to their listening. “This ain’t gonna be a pep talk, but soldiers, listen up. I don’t know if any of us will make it out of here, but these civilians volunteered to get infected. They’re probably all immune or they’d be dead down on ten right now. These civilians have a chance. Most of you don’t. Some of you may be immune, but the truth is that most of you will probably be infected and dead by the end of the week. But you know that as well as I do. When we run outta here, I’m not telling you to sacrifice yourself for civilians. I’m just tellin’ you to keep that in mind. If we get in a bad situation, remember why you put on that uniform. Be soldiers.”

Dalhover didn’t waste any time waiting for acceptance, agreement, or even a smile or a nod. He headed for the elevator shafts.

Dr. Evans looked around. He watched Sergeant Dalhover go, then looked at me. “Ready?”

I nodded.

Dr. Evans yelled, “Good luck and God bless! Let’s go!”

Hospital beds, gurneys stacked with computers, patient monitors, chairs, rolling cabinets, anything with wheels or any heavy object that could be piled on top were rolled toward the elevator bank.

Down at the corner by the elevators, Dalhover and I stood out of the way and watched as the soldiers guided each piece of heavy equipment into one each of the four open elevator doors. Each piece bounced down the shaft, making a hell of a noise, scrubbing the climbing infected from the walls, and hitting the bottom with the sound of a grenade explosion.

And more equipment followed.

The sound of automatic gunfire from far around the corner confirmed that the diversion had started. Three of the soldiers stood at the top of the exterior stairwell and fired at the hordes of infected who were either still on top of the garage or below on the west side of the hospital grounds.

If that worked, many of the Whites still outside would be drawn to that side of the hospital to feed on the dead.

A steady flow of beds rounded the corner and quickly disappeared down the shafts.

Fifteen minutes in and the gunfire had stopped. Those soldiers handling the diversion had secured the door and were in the hall on rearguard duty.

A guy by the one of the shafts yelled, “Clear! I think.”

I ran over and stuck my head through the open elevator door. A single bald, white head leaned through the door on the tenth floor, looking up at me. There was no light coming from the bottom of the shaft. It was clogged with a thick tangle of stainless steel, hospital bedding, shattered equipment, and shattered white bodies, at least that’s what I imagined. It was black. On the parts of the walls I could see in the light coming through our open doors, there were no climbers. I hoped that no more would be able to make up through the jumble at the bottom. Only those on ten would be a problem.

It was time to do or die, run or cry. I looked at Sergeant Dalhover and he gave me a nod. The two soldiers that I’d first met guarding the door to the exterior stairwell stood ready, along with a third, to follow me down.

Two deep breaths and I reached into the shaft, grabbed a sturdy piece of conduit, and swung a leg out over the chasm to find footing on the wall. I spider-crawled sideways, grabbing onto anything that look like it would hold my weight. The three men followed. Dalhover and three soldiers were in the shaft across the hall, doing the same.

After a frightfully long time that in reality couldn’t have been more than a minute, I put one bandaged, slippery hand on a rung of the service ladder and thanked God, though I don’t know why.

My feet found the rungs below and I wasted no time in working my way down to make room for the following soldiers. Moments later, I was down to the tenth floor, but well beyond the reach of rapacious hands.

Looking to solve that problem, a bold White leaned far out into the shaft, focused on the meals coming down the ladder. A moment later, a computer monitor crushed his head as it fell from above, dragging his big white body into the chasm. More infected were there behind him but it wasn’t my job to deal with them. That was for the three men above—soldiers to spread out on the walls around ten, opposite the elevator doors. They had side arms, and their job was to keep the infected focused on this shaft, another diversion.

I hurried down into the darkness, hoping nothing waited for me down there on the wall or the ladder.

The floor numbers were sloppily spray painted in large numerals on the concrete walls of the shaft beside each set of elevator doors. I had just passed the seventh and was barely able to make it out in the darkness when a white body and another piece of equipment crashed down not two feet away from me.

Gunshots echoed down from above.

Two more bodies fell.

I passed the sixth floor. A computer monitor, terrifyingly close, whooshed by and crashed into the pile of medical equipment and bodies below.

Only two floors to go!

But I was in the blackness now, feeling my way down the ladder, pausing between labored breaths and listening for the sound of a White. The air was full of sound seeping through the walls from outside, echoing down from above and up from below. From below, the sounds were of dying Whites, wrenched in the broken equipment at the bottom of the shaft. Or if my luck had turned to shit, it was the labored breathing of Whites climbing up out of the darkness toward me.

I hurried as fast as my bandaged hands allowed.

A very faint seam of light outlined the edges of a set of elevator doors. That was five.

More gunfire.

Another body.

I was breathing heavily from the exertion. My arms and hands were stiff.

Four!

I hollered up, “I’m here! Don’t drop anything else!”

I worked my way off of the ladder and onto a thin metal support attached to the wall, wide enough for only my toes. I grabbed conduit and pieces of metal framework and went as swiftly as I could.

More gunfire from above. I pressed myself to the wall, in case a flailing infected body was coming.

More gunfire.

“Damn! I just need another minute!”

A body brushed me as it fell past.

“Fuck!”

“You all right?” a voice called from above.

“I’m good!” My hands were shaking. I was breathing a lot more rapidly than necessary.

Calm down. I have to do this. I have to.

Necessity pushed caution aside. The longer I stayed on the wall of the shaft, the more likely it was that I would die at the bottom. I grabbed hurriedly with my hands and shuffled my feet. I slipped, almost fell, but recovered.

In seconds, I was in position beside the door.

I drew my machete, reached across the smooth, stainless steel width of the door, jammed it into the seam, and pried.

A gap appeared.

Light!

I looked around me. There were smears of blood on the wall. Bits of scalp here and there where sharp edges of the supporting steel framework stuck out an inch or two into the shaft. And below me, nothing moved on the walls, but the dying moans from the white bodies crammed into the broken equipment drew me to look at the bottom. That was an image queued up for repression. I turned away quickly.

I wiggled, pried, and pushed.

The doors parted, then slid apart. I adjusted my footing and my grip so that I could avoid the sliding door, then I stopped and listened.

I heard howling. I heard gunfire. I heard screams, but I didn’t hear or see anything on the fourth floor.

Luck?

I climbed past the door to where I could peek into the hall through the gap between the doors. Two infected squatted in the hall between the elevators, looking at me as curiously as I was looking at them.

None of us made any aggressive moves, but the infected looked around at the ceiling, the walls, and the closed elevator doors. Sound was everywhere and they were trying to identify a source they could get to. The elevator doors across the hall seemed to be piquing their interest the most.

I climbed out of the shaft and planted my feet firmly on the floor. With my machete in hand, ready to do the necessary work, I reached down for my Glock as a backup. It wasn’t there, and I recalled that I had given it to Steph. A curse was on my lips, but I felt better with her having it. She needed at least one weapon.

With both infected facing away from me for the moment, killing the first was easy. I swung hard at the back of her neck, severed her spine, and she crumbled. Blood spewed across the waxed floor. The other infected looked down at his partner rather than over at me. He seemed transfixed by the glossy, pooling blood. When he did see the blade of my machete swinging toward his throat, he tried vainly to block the blow but lost all the fingers on his right hand. The blade gashed his neck open anyway.

But he wasn’t dead.

His bloody, fingerless hand reached out for me. His mouth opened and closed, trying to scream or bite. I jumped back and he fell on his face, adding his blood to the pool on the floor.

I jumped back into the elevator door through which I’d come and waved up the shaft, holding out four fingers.

From above, a voice yelled, “Four!”

More gunfire followed.

I crossed the hall, jammed my machete into the seam between the elevator doors, and in moments I had them pried apart. Sergeant Dalhover was on the service ladder, looking back at me. I leaned in and looked up the ladder. It was full of our people. I didn’t look down to see if we’d lost any in their attempts to climb around the wall and make it over to the ladder. That was useless information that only held bad memories and nightmares.

Dalhover worked his way around the wall with the athleticism of a spider monkey, and within seconds was standing on the floor beside me.

“Any trouble on ten?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The diversion is working, but we lost one. She slipped and fell trying to get to the ladder.” Dalhover read the question on my face. “It wasn’t Nurse Leonard.”

“I’ll clear this floor while you get everyone out.”

Dalhover looked down at the two dead.

“There may be more.” I shrugged as though I needed to provide some kind of excuse for the two dead Whites. Intellectually, I knew they were murderous cannibals, but they looked as human as me. Some emotional artifacts of morality are hard to slough off.

I took off at a jog around the corner, peering into any open door, looking for movement. Closed doors I left alone.

Five more infected on the fourth floor died under my blade by the time I rendezvoused with the group at the elevator bank.

Twenty or thirty of us stood close, shuffling nervously, pointing weapons up and down the hall.

A soldier was firing his pistol up the elevator shaft that I’d come down. I was wishing he wouldn’t, but he knew the risks as well as I did. A scream echoed out of the shaft and the soldier jumped back. The now-familiar sound of bodies crashing into the medical equipment below drew every eye to the door. The soldier anxiously frowned and said, “They’re coming down the shaft!”

Dalhover asked, “McWilliams, Cook?”

The soldier shook his head.

Two
more dead.

Dr. Evans looked at me. 

I knew my part. I was the scout. The infected didn’t see me as a meal or a threat, mostly, so it made sense. I took off at a run. One of the soldiers followed thirty or forty feet behind.

The breezeway to the children’s hospital was angled off of the main hall, so I could see more and more of its length as I ran on. Through the glass walls of the breezeway, I saw down to the eight-lane highway that ran past the other side of the children’s hospital. It was clogged with cars and littered with human remains. East Austin was visible in the distance, with its demarcation of charred black to the north and lucky, impoverished neighborhoods to the south.

Bodies in various states of consumption lay in the hall. Equipment was scattered among bits of medical supplies.

Dead soldiers! Yes!

I chastised myself for the moment of excitement. They weren’t just potential sources of ammunition and weapons. I had to remember that the soldiers had been people, too. Or maybe it was better that I didn’t.

I scrounged some magazines that seemed full and left the rest for those following behind. Though the evidence kept suggesting otherwise, it was hard to let go of the action-movie truism that more weapons in more good guy hands was a good thing.

I ran out onto the breezeway. The sun glared through the glass walls, casting painful reflections off of the gleaming floor. Other than the remnants of a barricade, there wasn’t much of anything in the breezeway: the remains of some bodies marked by their scattered detritus, brass bullet casings, and blood on the glass. It was disturbingly beautiful translucent red in the sun’s brilliance, hand prints smeared in long arcs from eye level to floor, sprays where severed arteries emptied. But lower, chest height and down, the blood was smudged into nothingness. That caught my attention. It occurred to me that it had been licked off of the glass. Could it get any worse?

Gunshots from far behind urged us both forward. The infected from upstairs in the other building were coming down.

But there was motion ahead!

I raised a hand to signal the soldier following me to slow.

Down at the end of the breezeway, at the entrance to the children’s hospital, infected were feeding on the dead. As I moved closer, I counted seven heads bobbing up and down, tearing back and forth, grinding their teeth into the flesh of the corpses. I paused and almost stumbled.

The feeding infected were all children, white and skinny, in hospital gowns. One child looked up at me with wispy strands of hair over a
bald head, dark circles under sunken eyes. That kid must have had cancer when the virus claimed him. Another face popped up, sallow cheeks smeared in blood, chewing teeth working on a stringy strand of muscle.

There were so few children among the infected that it was a surprise to see them. Children were slow, weak, and naïve
; natural victims and easy prey. Of course there weren’t that many.

With the eyes of children’s, not beasts, they watched me approach, curious and innocent, innocent with mouths dripping the clotting blood of the dead.

They all needed to die, and I needed to kill them.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

As I got close, the wispy-haired cancer kid sat up on his heels and waited for me. With as much self-hate as I’d ever felt, I hauled my blade back and swung it around. He didn’t move. Like a young Russell, he just watched the blade arc toward his tiny skull, which nearly exploded as the machete tore through fragile bone. For the second time in a day, and perhaps just the second time since I was twelve, I wanted to cry.

A girl of eleven or twelve with long blond hair squatted beside the boy, blinking bits of his brain matter out of her eyes when my backhand swing severed her thin neck with little resistance. Her blond hair whipped across my eyes as her head spun into the air. A splash of her arterial blood splattered my face and open mouth. I wailed.

Another girl, maybe five, rolled over, grabbed my left foot, and tried to bite through my boot. I dropped to a knee and felt bones crunch as my weight came down her. She was coughing blood and trying vainly to move her arms when I slashed a dark-haired boy who’d figured out that I was a threat.

The last three children were coming at me by then and I hacked wildly at grasping hands, tiny arms, and vicious little teeth. It only took a few seconds and they were all down. I froze in a ready position, breathing heavily between the blood-splattered windows and dripping ceiling, hacked limbs and severed heads at my feet. Disgusted by the taste, I spit what felt like a mouthful of the blond girl’s blood onto the floor.

One child’s body jerked, headless on the floor, not yet all the way dead. The broken girl still coughed up blood as she cried and lolled her head, but wasn’t able to do more.

I looked back to the other end of the breezeway. The soldier’s expression was hard to read in the distance, but his mouth was hanging open, his arms dangling at his sides. He’d been as horrified watching as I’d been in the doing.

But it was necessary. Of course it was necessary.

It had to be necessary.

I felt like a monster.

A loathsome, shame-filled monster.

Move. Move!

Breathe.

Don’t think about it.

The hallway at the end of the breezeway split to the left and right into the children’s hospital. I pointed left and waited for a confirming nod from the still frozen soldier before moving cautiously ahead.

Rounding the corner, I was confronted by a thin girl of about thirteen with heavily bandaged arms. Further down the hall was a boy of a similar size. Behind me in the hall, leading in the other direction, a girl of four or five sat by the wall, gnawing on something.

Please, God, let this be all of them.

The thin girl with the bandages charged.

I turned away from the little gnawing one and hacked down with my machete. The blade tore through the thin girl’s collarbone and into her chest, lodging in her rib cage. I cursed myself for having notched the blade when I vented my frustration on the car earlier that morning. Deep red blood gushed from her mouth, and she coughed a wicked scream as she sank to the floor.

The patter of small feet and an asthmatic wheeze came from behind me. I spun and kicked the gnawing little girl hard under the jaw. Her head snapped back and she dropped to the floor, wide-eyed and bloody-mouthed, but motionless.

For the first time in my life, I wished the Harpy's harsh words and the Ogre's menacing fists had finished their work and beaten all of the humanity out of me when they had the chance.

Ill-prepared to bear the grinding of bone on metal, I placed a boot on the thin girl’s chest and wrestled my machete loose, freeing her blood to roll across the shiny floor. Up the hall, the gangly brown-haired boy stood, frozen and staring with a familiar blankness on his face, a blankness that wouldn’t last.

With dripping machete in hand, I ran at him, intent on chopping that accusatory blankness away. And he did nothing but watch as I hacked him down.

Once on the floor, he was just a pale skinned child, staring and silent. Blood oozed out of fresh wounds, capillary action pulling it into florid red blossoms on his hospital gown, gluing the gown to his bony ribs as it dampened. His mouth worked slowly, as if trying to tell me something important, but no words came, only burbles of blood and spit that splattered up in a little fountain driven by his dying breaths, staining his face with pain as it rained back down and flowed into his brown hair.

His eyes looked up at me for many long, accusing seconds before they glassed over with death.

His brilliant red blood crept across the floor in a sadly feeble attempt to drown its owner’s killer. Still the dead eyes stared.

And stared.

The boy hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t been aggressive. He hadn’t moved.

The familiarity of the blankness on his face clicked in my mind. Russell!

Had I just killed a younger version of Russell?

Every curse word I knew exploded in my mind, held back by my stifling lips. I wanted to scream and scream and scream.

The slap of bare feet on the smooth floor pulled my attention back into the moment.

Another girl was running up the hall, at me… or past me. It didn’t matter. When she got within range of my machete, I cut her down to bleed and die beside the docile, brown-haired boy. After she went down, there was silence in the curved hall. Nothing moved except the blood, crawling it’s way across the smooth floor and clinging to my soles.

Was the children’s hospital the most horrific place yet?

It felt that way.

Stuff it away!

Stuff it away!

Put it all some place black and deep.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I ran around the curve of the hall until I reached a stairwell door. That was my goal. That was our planned escape route. Unfortunately, There was no window on the door to reveal the interior. I muttered a curse, turned the knob, and pushed it open.

“Shit!”

The stairwell was full of infected!

The big ones!

They howled as I pulled the door shut again.

My kingdom for a grenade!

A group too dumb to work a door, though
—
my favorite kind. At least there was that. But how long would the door stay shut now that they had seen me open and close it? The fear of being trapped kicked my brain into a higher gear. I needed to find another exit. The description of the children’s hospital provided by Dr. Evans included an atrium further up the hall with a wide stairway that curved all the way down to ground level. It was time to run again. If the atrium wasn’t clear, we’d have to chance another elevator shaft. But did we have time for that?

No.

Every moment in the halls of the hospital with no barricade between us and the infected was a risk, a big, big risk. We couldn’t hope to hold off any significant number of them with only bullets.

Ahead of me, the hall opened up to the four-story atrium, walled with glass, filled with tropical plants and sunshine. I came to a halt against a chrome railing, supported by waist-high glass panels. As promised, a wide, open stairway meandered down through the space to the lobby floor. Remains of the dead littered the lobby. Among the remains, a White that looked like a hobbit’s grandmother with fucked-up hair rambled in a circle. Her fitful grunts echoed off the sterile walls.

Choosing to gloss over any thoughts about why a grandmother might have been at the children’s hospital when the world went to shit a week ago, I instead focused on her physical unsightliness. She would die quickly when I got down there.

I repositioned to get a better angle on a view out the front doors. The infected were out there, but there weren’t many. The diversion had worked. We had a chance if I could get the others here in a hurry.

I bolted back up the hall.