The Lazarus Impact (7 page)

CHAPTER 13

Sheryl hears grunts, but not like the kind Mr. Mortenson made in his attack. These are the sounds of fighting; strikes and thuds. Then all becomes quiet, except for the constant sound of the fire alarm in the hallway. She sits still, waiting. She waits for hours, days, maybe more. It feels like forever. After quite a bit of time the lights begin to flicker, as if draining. When they go out, the silence grows. Machines whir down to a stop, the heat shuts off, the fire alarm finally stops. Her ears become sharp to the slightest of noises; a distant and slight rattling down the hall, a flapping of fabric closer by. Sheryl works up the courage to stand, pressing her ear to the door. The noises sound like patterns to her. Unliving, but not undead. She quietly opens the door. She tucks the wooden handle from the toilet plunger under her bad arm to use as a weapon. Peeking out into her room she sees a mess of toppled and splintered furniture throughout. Broken machines are scattered about the floor. Smudges and splatters of blood cover the walls. She sees a pair of legs on the ground, face down, connected to a body that lies partially outside the door frame and into the hall.

She squeezes her thin body out of the bathroom door, barely opening it so as not to squeak the hinges. She tip toes quietly toward the body straddling into the hallway, plunger handle in hand. She pokes at its shoes. There’s no response. She moves to the side to see the rest of the body outside the door frame. A puddle of blood surrounds the head, and a nice sized chunk of skull is missing, as if hacked off. It looks like Dr. Levy, but his white smock is so drenched with blood that it has turned a deep burgundy. She prods him several times with the plunger handle.
Yup, he’s dead
. She sticks her head out into the hallway.

Bodies are strewn about haphazardly and a cold ghostly wind fills the corridor, gently blowing the curtained partitions midway down the hall near the main section of the ER.
The flapping sound
. Her heart races and her adrenaline drowns her aches and pains. She shakes with fearful energy as she slowly begins to walk the hall. She passes Mr. Mortenson. She passes Tina the nurse, and the orderly too.

Up ahead the doors to the ambulance bay are wide open, just past the morgue at the far end of the corridor; they become her goal. A glaring sun beams in as it sets, or perhaps rises, from beyond. The bodies become silhouettes, darkened bumps on the ground. She has to partially shield her eyes from the blinding rays. The glare bounces up off the blood-reflective floor, filling the glass of her gas mask with white and turning the hall a macabre ruby shade of red. She can’t escape it. The light fills the entire hall.

Sheryl slowly passes room after room. Some are filled with death. Windows are broken in several of them.
People must’ve jumped out to freedom
.
That might be the best idea
. Fearful of the hallway, she steals into an empty room with a broken window in hopes to climb out, but she sees the mayhem that was once inside the hospital is now outside. The picturesque field surrounding the hospital is dotted with gore.
Everyone who breathed in that debris must have gone to the hospital, died, and come back to attack people
.
I’m in the worst possible place for safety
.
I can’t outrun them; I’m injured
.
I need to get to a car if I can
.
There must be something near the ambulance bay
.
There has to be
.
It’s my only chance aside from hiding
.
If I can get away, maybe I can ride out the mayhem at home
.

She continues to walk the hallway. The sunlight becomes less obtrusive; it is setting. She’s afraid to look at the grotesque bodies, ripped apart as if by wolves, but she must. With each one she passes, she waits quietly to see if they still stir. She passes the nurse’s station and moves into the ER. The curtain partitions eerily flow up and back down with every gust of wind that whistles through the broken glass windows.
The flapping sound
.
It’s nothing to fear
.
But does the breeze still carry the poisonous dust?
The flutter fills her ears, and visions of blood and horror fill her eyes. The fear grows in her. Her pulse quickens. She thinks she sees a man standing behind one of the curtains. She turns with a gasp, plunger handle at the ready. But as the curtain blows away it reveals an IV stand with a coat draped over it. Her frightened eyes have deceived her.
Stupid
.

But then there’s a growl, a crash, and one of the other curtains comes rushing at her. Behind it is a bloodied man filled with rage. Sheryl backs away, swinging the handle frantically with all her might. She strikes him on the head and he falls forward, onto her. She winces in pain at the pressure on her bad arm. The hospital curtain blocks his mouth, but the faceless, unrelenting horror tries to eat her alive through it. She spins out of the way and lets him fall to the ground. She strikes his head over and over. The curtain covering him begins to soak through with blood as she incessantly smashes him. The curtain rips, and blood casts off in every direction as she flings her arm up and back down with each swing. She hears the crack of his skull and sees his brain spill out onto the floor, but she keeps pounding until he stops moving.

The handle drips with red sludge and brain matter when she’s finished. Her gas mask is covered with filth, and clumps of her wavy brown hair have turned black with the wetness of death. Disgusted, she wipes herself down with another nearby curtain and catches her breath. But not for long. The sun has dipped below the horizon, and night approaches.
I need to get home before dark, otherwise things could get much more dangerous
.

She moves faster, trying to ignore the pain that floods her body again after the fight. She starts to hear the rattling sound growing louder.
It’s coming from the morgue
. As she passes by the swinging double doors she tries to look inside, but it is too dark to see in the windowless room. In a fit of courage she pulls a door and props it open. All is silent but the rattling. The room is dim, lit only by the fading sunlight that creeps in from the ambulance bay. It barely reaches the back wall, which is still shrouded in darkness.

She sees bloodied bodies left on the stainless steel tables, covered in reddened hospital sheets.
Their heads are all smashed open, but will they still sit up in death and come at me?
She pokes one with the plunger handle. There’s no response.
It must be safe. They’re dead for good. Someone has been through the hospital, killing the undead
.

Blood pools on the floor beneath the corpses, slowly making its way into a drain in the center of the room. She looks to the back wall, and her eyes find the source of the rattling sound; the latch on one of the freezer boxes flickers as it catches the fleeting light with each shake.
It’s the one next to Stephen
.
Someone is trying to get out from inside
.
It’s BJ, I know it’s BJ
...

The rattling suddenly stops. Emotions sweep over her like a hot flash as she is filled with thoughts and memories of playing with the boys, cleaning their scrapes from rough housing in the yard, and those first moments in the maternity ward where she gave birth to them.
That was just upstairs from where I’m standing
.
Things were happy then, and easy
. She’s overwhelmed with grief, horror, and shock as the rattling of the latch starts again, pulling her back into reality. She resolves to put BJ out of his misery.
He’s turned into one of those things, one of those zombies
.
Unnatural
.
Evil
. She clenches the plunger handle so tight that her pink fingertips turn white. She pushes into the darkness. Her own shadow blocks what she can see in front of her, but she makes her way toward the freezer. Like pulling off an old band-aid, she yanks the door open quickly and jumps back, out of the darkness.

BJ sits up from his slab and turns toward her. His eyes seem to glow in the dark like an animal’s. The sparse light gives him a vague shape, making him a silhouette among shadows. He slowly steps forward into the light. She can see him now. He’s naked. His jaw is twisted and crooked. One of his ankles drags behind as he moves forward. His arm is broken, as is Sheryl’s will to do what she set out to do.
It won’t be like killing the man in the hall
.
This is my son, one of the only things that bring me joy
.
I think I can still see the light of love in his eyes
. She’s wrong. There is only hatred, hunger, and bloodlust.

“BJ?” She says with a quiet lunacy shaking through her voice. There’s no response; nothing but a distant stare. “Come to mommy, BJ.”
I must sound so stupid
.
I know what he is, but my heart hurts
. She cries in her mask, and it begins to fog. She hears a growl and a shuffle. BJ shambles toward her. Sheryl stumbles back in fear, dropping the plunger handle. She grabs for it blindly as the inside of her mask clouds up almost completely. Her hand grasps a cold metal rod. She gets her footing and pulls it over. It’s heavy and connected to something else. The fog clears and she sees that she has hold of the small wheeled shelf containing medical tools.

BJ lunges at her. She yanks on the shelf and it rolls in front of her just before BJ can reach her with his cold grasp. The corner of the table meets with his delicate head. He falls lifeless to the blood-muddied tile floor, his frozen eggshell skull cracked like thin ice. She whimpers over his corpse for a moment.
Goodbye, my baby
. She places a gentle hand over his heart before leaving him.

In the last minutes of daylight, Sheryl hurriedly exits the hospital through the ambulance bay, leaving the plunger handle behind. She sees a nearby cop car with its lights flashing, parked with the door open. A man in uniform slumps at the wheel. She lightly shakes him a few times. When there’s no response she flops him to the ground beside the car. She fiddles around looking for the car keys.
They’re not in the ignition, not in the car
.
They must be in his pocket
. She looks over at the corpse and studies him.
He’s not wearing a gas mask
.
He has no wounds, and there’s no blood on him
.
He choked from the debris
. With apprehension in every step, Sheryl approaches him.
I have to move quickly before he comes back to life or wakes up
. Fear grips her.

She feels around his body for the keys, and finds them in his front pocket. She reaches in, glancing at his empty gun holster. As she pulls the keys out she hears him moan. His eyes burst open, glazed and clouded with white, but also bloodshot and slightly glowing yellow. He sits up sluggishly and Sheryl falls backward into the driver’s seat with her legs out the door, facing him. He stands up and shambles toward her. He walks into the car door and it shuts on her legs, hurting her, trapping her there as he pushes forward, trying to claw at her face from above the door window. Sheryl starts the car. Her jeans rip as they scrape against the metal of the door jamb when she tries to yank her legs inside. When blood starts to flow from the cuts underneath, the beast begins to frenzy. He looks down and sees her legs, turning his attention from Sheryl’s head to the meat sticks that dangle from the bottom of the car door. He reaches for them. For a split second the door is freed and she pulls her legs in a bit further, but he has hold of one of her ankles. She can feel his teeth gnawing at the rubber on her sneaker. His grip is tight like a vice. She yanks and yanks with everything she has left in her.

Then, in that moment, she hears footsteps quickly approaching on the asphalt, running toward her. She panics.
More zombies are coming to get me
.
They’ll pry the door open and drag me out for dinner
. In a flash she sees an axe arc down from above. Blood sprays across the car windows and the cop falls to the ground, dead again. The maintenance man buried the fire axe into the zombie cop’s head.

“Lemme in,” he says, trying the door that Sheryl quickly closed and locked as soon as she had the chance. Sheryl looks him over as he circles around to the passenger door, checking for wounds or bites. He seems alright, but his clothes are soiled with a crimson stench. “Come on lady there’s more of those things coming!” Sheryl lets him in and they speed off into the dusk.

CHAPTER 14

The hospital is quiet, seemingly empty. Wolf tried the cell phone for hours to no avail. His battery is almost dead anyway, so he sits on some medical supply boxes. He eats the pre-packaged pudding that Dr. Vogel left for him. He feels a bit stronger than before, so after finishing a container of vanilla and chocolate swirl, he starts kicking at the door again.
It’s no use
. His lungs don’t feel like they’re burning anymore, but it still tires him out to exert that kind of energy.
But if Dr. Vogel were here, I think I’d be able to gin up the rage to beat the tar out of him
.

Wolf looks all around the room, sizing things up. The vent in the ceiling is too small to crawl into. There are linens, some scrubs, a mop bucket, cleaning supplies, and a broom. He grabs the broom and pulls the brush off, jamming the stick between the door and metal handle. He pries at it, trying to pop the handle, but the broom snaps. Frustrated, he jabs the end of the wood at the door window, but the reinforced glass won’t crack. He throws the broom against the back wall in frustration. It makes a dent. His eyes widen at the sight of it. He puts his hand on it and feels around.
The other walls are solid, but the back is sheetrock
.
At some point the room must’ve been partitioned
. He musters his energy again and rams his shoulder into the back wall, caving in the drywall between two wooden studs. He uses his foot to hammer out the rest with a few more big bursts of energy, pushing through to the other room. It’s dark, but there’s a door ahead, and it’s wide open. He reaches back in and swipes some scrubs. He puts them on, and slips out the door after peeking out into the hallway.

I blend in well enough, looking like an employee, but if anyone does a double take they’ll recognize me
. He quickly grabs a clip board hanging outside a nearby room and holds it at face level, pretending to read it as he passes by others in the hallway. He follows the exit signs and soon he’s back out in the parking lot, undetected. It’s night, so even easier to go unnoticed. He looks around suspiciously before getting into the truck.

He tosses ideas around his constantly calculating brain as he heads back to the motel and his crew.
We could fill up on gas and take turns driving nonstop until we reach the Pacific
.
We would need some supplies and food though. Then again if we had to I could help us all live off the wilderness for as long as it takes to ride out the effect of the meteors
.
We could also hijack a crop duster from a local farm and fly low, under any radar that might be working
.

Wolf fiddles with the radio as he thinks through his options. There’s nothing except the emergency broadcast he heard on the way to the hospital. Poisoned air, and now he assumes there’s a more strict quarantine, based on how Dr. Vogel locked him up.

Shelter in place
, he thinks to himself as he hears the radio message loop.
That’s a bloody death sentence
.
I was exposed to the dust, but I’m on the other side of the quarantine
.
I’m a danger to the entire system, to the world even
.
But that’s only if the officials managed to contain everyone else
.
I doubt they did
.

Americans have a unique way about them; they don’t like to be bossed. It was something that he, as a rugged Australian who grew up frequenting the wild outback with complete freedom, could identify with. It was part of why the American audience loved him so much. He was a rough rider. A cowboy. A self sufficient man of action.

He tries the CB radio and hears a clatter of voices so thick he can barely make out any coherent sentences. The channels normally designated to emergency and highway information are a mess. He flips through a few more channels and comes upon a less populated one. He listens in on the conversation. A man with a high pitched crackling mid-western accent is mid-way through a story.

“And then after a few minutes the sum’ bitch gets back up! I mean I just watched him drop to the ground and stop breathing. I was already started to diggin’ a hole, and was fixin’ to give him a burial, proper like. And then he starts comin’ at me, angry like. He didn’t respond to nothin’ I said. He was like one of them zombies from the old movies, you know? So I fired a warning shot in the air. That didn’t stop him. Then I fired at his leg. Hit him just above the knee cap. I tell you what, that bastard kept comin’ at me! I put the final bullet right between his eyes and that sure stopped him. Over.”

Another man with a deep, raspy voice joins in. “I know they’re saying that air over the east is poison. I guess it always has been. Didn’t take no meteor to tell us those yanks were crazy.” The men chuckle. “But you just proved them other rumors true. It makes you die. But then you come back, and when you come back you’re bloodthirsty. A cannibal, like. Reckon you might be right when you call ‘em zombies there, Spider. Heard about some meteor impacts overseas too. Over.”

Wolf grabs the talk piece and presses the call button.
These kinds of folks are my bread and butter audience
. Mid-west US patriots, or so the ratings people tell him, are his biggest fans.
Maybe I can get some info from them
. “Breaker one six, breaker one six.” He waits for a response.

“Cough Drop here. What’s your handle?” asks the second man with the throaty voice.

“This is the Wolf,” he replies.

“Spider here,” says the first. “You ain’t from ‘round here, are you? Over.”

“No sir. From Australia originally. Over.”

“Australia? Wolf? You mean like the guy on TV?” Spider asks through a laugh.

“I
am
the guy on TV, mate. We made it just west of the impact before they put the barricade up and grounded the planes. Over.”

“Well that’s swell for you, but it ain’t so swell for us,” Cough Drop says.

“How so?” Wolf asks.

“If you think the military is bad, wait’ll you see what the locals will do,” says Spider. “Infected folk ain’t s’posed to be west of the quarantine. People are already spreadin’ this plague around, causin’ panic. They don’t care who y’are. They’ll shoot ya dead if they see you sick. It’s like survival of the fittest. Over.”

“How are you still alive, Wolf? I saw the show. You were right there, breathing that stuff in,” says Cough Drop. “Unless this is a punk kid messin’ around. Over.”

“I’m not messing with you. This is the real Wolf. I was coughing for hours after that bit. My lungs burned, I got real tired, and I couldn’t do much of anything without feeling wiped out. I went to a doctor and the guy tried to lock me up in a room, probably because I was west of the quarantine. I broke out when I started feeling stronger. Whatever this dust is doing to people, it isn’t working on me anymore. It’s like I’m immune. Over.” There’s silence for several moments. “Breaker one six?” He calls out again. Still nothing.

“You better watch yourself out there,” Cough Drop breaks the silence after a moment.

“Yeah man. The people love you, but it ain’t like it used to be,” Spider adds. “It’s already like the wild west, good buddy. Amazing what happens when the shit hits the fan, eh? Suddenly us redneck folks are the wise ones again, bein’ prepared with guns and all.”

“You folks always were the wise ones, Spider,” Wolf responds with a smile they can’t see. “Thanks for the warning, fellas. Over.”

“Godspeed, Wolf,” Cough Drop adds.

He pulls up to the dark motel. Lots of people were on the road earlier, filling up the roadside motels. Many were escapees like him who made it past the impact zone before the big meteor hit. Wolf and his crew took the last vacant rooms when they arrived. He thought it would be buzzing with activity, but it’s quiet. There’s no power, but at least there are beds. He could use the rest.

He sees shadows moving behind the curtains in his darkened room.
The other guys must still be awake
. As he approaches the door he notices a foul yellow pool of vomit at his feet.
Looks like they found some beer
.
Nothing else to do but have a rage
. His crew was like that. A few of them were his old rugby mates, so they often went on binges during the down time between shows.

He opens the door and is greeted with a vile stench. It’s like puke, piss and shit all mixed into one putrid potpourri. His arm comes up to his face to shield his nose, when Dale, his cameraman, grabs it and tries to bite it. Wolf instinctively shoves his palm into Dale’s face, knocking him back into the room.

“Sorry mate,” Wolf says. “What the hell are you doing in here, having a romp?” There’s no reply. The moonlight creeps in from the doorway and he sees the shadow of a body on the floor. The 1970s era olive green carpeting underneath is wet and reddened with blood and entrails. “What the?”

Dale lunges at him, knocking him to the puke covered ground outside the door. Wolf manages to roll him over and get on top. He sees his eyes shine in the moonlight; an inhuman golden amber with no sign of a pupil. His mouth is foaming like a rabid dog, and he pulls at Wolf’s ER scrubs, trying to get close for a chomp. Wolf clenches Dale’s throat so tight his thumb and forefinger nearly touch behind Dale’s wind pipe. The pain doesn’t seem to faze Dale. With his other hand Wolf reaches down to his boot, where he always keeps a small utility knife. He swings it open with his teeth and holds the point to Dale’s temple. “Don’t make me do this buddy,” he says, remembering Spider’s story about how the only thing that stopped the infected was a blow to the head. He hopes the knife would do the same trick as the bullet. “Say something if you’re still in there,” he says, but Dale doesn’t respond with words. He only growls, drools, and tries to bite and claw at Wolf’s arm. Wolf closes his eyes and slowly pushes the knife into Dale’s head.

“No don’t do it!” Buzz, the sound tech, yells from the window of the next room. But it’s too late. Dale has stopped moving. Buzz whips open the door and steps outside. “What did you do?”

“Did you see him, mate? He was trying to eat me alive!” Wolf yells, catching his breath from the scuffle.

“Yeah I saw. But it’s Dale. It’s Dale!” Buzz’s eyes are wild, panicked.

“Come over here and look in the room. Come see what he did to James.” Wolf points and Buzz peeks into the room to see the carnage. He’s in shock. He steps out of the room confused, backing up into the parking lot.

“No. No this can’t be happening! This is crazy! What are we going to do?” he says.

Wolf hadn’t noticed at first, but many of the other motel rooms have their doors open.
It’s so quiet because everyone else is dead
. “Look out!” Wolf yells. A zombie charges Buzz from the room right next to him and tackles him to the ground, ripping his neck open. All the yelling attracted the other ones from their rooms, and soon there’s a swarm of five out in the parking lot, devouring Buzz.

Wolf grabs a 2x4 from a pickup parked beside his SUV and starts whacking them in the head with all his might. He coughs and breathes heavy, but it works. With a few swings he cracks their skulls open and kills them. One down, two down, three.
They’re one-track minded
.
They don’t pay me any attention when their meal is sitting there
. Wolf wheezes, his lungs too tired to swing anymore. He can hear Buzz gurgling in pain beneath the last two savages. He pushes himself to keep going and swings at one of them, knocking him off of Buzz. Buzz’s intestines are out, lying on the pavement like tubes of sausage. Wolf brings the 2x4 down again, killing one. Buzz starts to twitch and convulse, and the last zombie stops eating him. It immediately turns to Wolf and lunges, but Wolf steps aside, and the demon’s face meets the end of a rod of rebar that hangs off the back of the pickup truck, impaling itself through the eye and killing it instantly.

Buzz stops twitching and starts to vomit. Whatever’s left of his digestive system pushes out of his bladder and remaining intestines. A purging. The smell is repulsive, and Wolf himself begins to retch. Suddenly Buzz stops moving, seemingly frozen in death. Wolf knows what’s going to happen next.
Buzz is going to come back to life if he’s not too far gone, and he’s going to attack
. He shoves the dead zombie off the rebar in the pickup, flopping him to the ground. He rifles through the stuff in the truck bed, looking for a better weapon than a 2x4. He comes up with a crowbar.
This will have to do
.

He stands over Buzz, catching his breath and waiting for him to stir back to life. He hears the moans first, and then the growl. When Buzz gnashes his teeth, Wolf crushes his skull with the rounded end of the crowbar.