The Reanimates (Book 3): The Escape (5 page)

We went from one building to the next, repeating the process over and over again of finding the pockets of the dead, killing them, and moving on. Our pile of zombies in the street grew ever larger. What started off as an emotional roller coaster turned into a task in numbness, until the second to last business was empty.

When we began this clearing out of the buildings, I asked for the medical center to be the last one. I wanted to have something to look forward to, and cleaning out where I was going to be able to go to work again made me happy. There was even a house next door that we had cleared out that I wanted to claim, mostly so I would be right next to where I was going to work, and I also wanted to start imagining myself in my house. This was a step in feeling normal again, and I craved that hope with everything in me.

I stood outside this small building with its long wheelchair ramp and overgrown tree branches that hung like a heavy blanket over the roof and admired the easy look to the building. It had a homey feel and had it not been for the signs outside in the parking lot that proclaimed this to be a place of healing, I'd have assumed that this was just a heavily modified home. That was a feature of Wilsall that I liked the most, every place looked like it was where people lived. I could only imagine the civic pride that the people who lived here must have felt. I felt it now.

I took a walk around the building to see if there were any obvious signs of someone having looted this place before we came here, and was shocked that all the glass was intact and the doors didn't seem to be pried open. I walked up to the back door to test the lock and it was secure.

I was smiling as I half jogged down to where the others stood. When I caught up to them, for a moment I was without words. I just stood there grinning. Trent, who had been tense since the mercantile, lifted his hands in a 'Well, what's going on?' gesture. I smiled bigger.

"It's in one piece on the outside. All of the windows are still there and the back door is even locked. It looks beautiful."

"Well, that's a start," Lucas said, "At least there isn't going to be mountains of repair work to make the structure safe."

"I suppose it's time to see if the insides are just as intact." Trent looked exhausted, and I was glad that this was the last place to take care of. He took the lead and we walked up the winding wheelchair ramp. When we approached the front door, we noticed a small sign in the window. It said,

"We can't accept any more patients. We are out of everything. We don't know what else to do. Good luck."

As though to punctuate what the note was saying, a zombie dressed in a lab coat stained with blood appeared against the glass. The pocket on the coat was embroidered with his name, Dr. James Carrol. Dr. Carrol had a horrible bite wound just above his right wrist, visible now that the sleeve slid down as he started to bang on the glass window. He pressed his face on the glass, trying to breech the mystic force field. His jagged, broken, blackened teeth snapped at the air, as though one of those bites would magically land on our skin. A female zombie, dressed in scrubs, was drawn by the commotion that Dr. Carrol was making. As she came closer to the glass, she realized that there was food just out of reach. I didn't see a bite mark on her, but the amount of blood that stained her floral print scrub top, from high on her side to the cuff of her white scrub pants, proved she was hurt. She walked unevenly to the window, as though one leg was shorter than the other, and when I looked at her feet, I understood why; she lost one of those nursing clog shoes from her left foot.

Zombies wearing hospital gowns sat on the floor in the dimly lit hallway. The waiting area to the side of the check-in window held a mixture of regularly dressed people, patients, and another couple of nurses, milling around with no purpose, just a collection of lost souls.

There were a lot of zombies inside.

The idea that there were going to be a lot of them inside was not a shock. People got bit, then sick, and reached out for a chance of life. They went to their trusted doctors, hoping for something that could make them feel better. Hospitals were the first place to be overrun back home. Part of me had this delusion that since California and New York were the first to fall, that the areas that the virus trickled into, like this one, would have been better prepared. I figured there would be no bite patients allowed in the medical center because they knew what a bite meant. The news went on and on about avoiding hospitals before we lost our feed, and the group we ran into from New Orleans said that the cameras continued to roll even after we lost ours. My happy high left when I saw how many people were bit in there. I couldn't wrap my brain around it. They wouldn't have accepted TB patients that were coughing up blood, would they? This doctor had no reason to die.

It really made me angry that the medical staff here were infected. I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't expecting to have any feelings over these idiots who gathered where they were told not to, but I did. These were healers, and now they were dead.

I wondered how things would have been different if I had been floated to the ER the night that the virus came to my hospital, when all those trauma codes came rolling in. I wondered about the people that were working that day when the CDC made the reanimates speech. How many of them stayed at work, wanting so badly to help, and how many people were lost because of it? How many doctors clung to the oath they took to help others, even after it was clear that there was nothing else they could do.

Every once in a while, a little bit of survivor's guilt that I got out wormed its way into my head. I left work that day when my shift ended and I was spared. There were so many nurses and doctors and janitors there. There were so many people that were much more skilled than I that died that day, and I was spared. Those ER doctors would have been a valued member of any group, and would have been able to handle so much more than my nurse self. If a doctor had been in our group, DaWayne's surgery would have gone so much better; Joey would have had a chance. Doctor Carrol here? He would have been able to save so many lives, but instead, he was rotting, and all that information in his head was gone.

I realized after a while of staring into the window, that the rest of the group was waiting on me. I shook myself off and made a smile happen.

"We ready to kick some rotted butt?" I chirped, trying to make myself sound more upbeat than I felt. I pulled my blade out of the sheath, bounced from side to side to loosen myself up, and added, "Let's do this."

The door to the medical center was one of those automatic sliding doors and the power had long been out. Ty found a pin that held everything together and Trent lifted the door off its tracks a bit, just enough to slide the door open. This definitely caught the attention of the zombies, and they all pushed towards the small opening.

Lucas took the first zombie that appeared at the crack, a nurse who must have been much larger before all of this, given how her scrub top hung on her. He pushed his sword through her eye and she fell to the ground in a thump. The spot where she was standing was quickly replaced with another, this time a patient, and I took it out. The bodies quickly piled up as we repeated this process until there was no more room, and Trent opened the door a little more to attract more zombies. We continued this method until the door couldn't be opened any farther. Tyreese and Lucas grabbed the shirt of one of the zombies on the bottom of the pile and pulled it outside with us, taking several with it. Trent and I were ready when the opening was refilled with more dead.

In all, thirty-five zombies were taken care of, more than I
would have thought this small place could hold. When we were done removing the corpses, the piles more than doubling in size, we took a look around.

The note in the window didn't lie. There really wasn't a lot left. I had simply hoped for exam tables, and there were those, but not much more. All the antibiotics were gone, most of the gauze and IV sets were gone, and only a couple of random packets of Tylenol were left on the med shelves.

I wished for a well-stocked clinic, but accepted that this was what it was, and at least it was something. I imagined that the houses were going to have random medical supplies, and this was where we were going to put them all. When we went house to house before, we were only interested in clearing bodies. Now that the body job was done, we could consider resources. Once that wall went up, we were going to be able to bring everyone here for the day and choose homes and move resources into the right places again. It was funny that even after the experience we had in the complex we were going to go back to setting up the centers, but it had worked so well.

While Ty and Lucas were dropping off the second load of zombies at the dump point so we could be done for the day, I went through and opened windows in the clinic. I found some bottles of ammonia in the cleaning closet, so I opened one and poured it on the floor where the zombies had bled out. I wanted to start getting rid of the smell as soon as possible. If I didn't have this cleaned out there would be no point in this place, no one would come here.

When the truck came back, we loaded the rest of the bodies and piled inside the cab. I couldn't wait to reach to the safe house. As soon as we were done for the day, I was going to brave that cold water to work the bulk of this dirt and gore off of me, then I was going to boil up some water and take a long, hot bath.

Walls

When morning came, with my part in the early stages of getting the town set up done, it was time for me to go home. The next thing on the to-do list was to build the wall, and since I had no idea how to drive a semi-truck to retrieve the shipping containers for the town, I would just be in the way. Until the wall was in place, there was nothing to stop zombies from coming in. There was no way to know if we were going to maintain the upper hand, so we decided to hold off collecting stuff until then.

I wasn't going home empty handed though; we had a little surprise for the folks back home. Lucas had been thinking about the fish net idea and discovered a badminton set in the garage. He took the net and tied rocks to the bottom so it would sink properly and tied the top corners to trees before going to bed. It had a little slack so the fish would find themselves caught in it rather than just stopped. When we woke up that morning, there was a ton of fish in it. It worked like a charm. I unearthed a cooler from a mound of camping stuff in the garage and we filled it to the brim with the silvery treasures. I couldn't wait to see the looks on the faces of the group.

Trent wanted to give me a ride home so he could see his family before getting to work on the wall project. We had no idea how long this would take, no idea how many semi-trailers were in the area. If there weren't enough trailers locally, this could take a while.

The plan was that the guys would rotate out as often as possible, probably every couple of weeks, but in our world, things had a way of changing on you. I hoped that we were due for good things to come our way.

The ride home was quiet. Trent and I were tired from all the work we did on the town, and tired made for weak conversationalists. I missed things like the radio or MP3 players. Road noise just made you feel even more tired sometimes.

We were coming up on that little building with the man on the porch. I sat up to see if he was there again today. I was actually hopeful over seeing another person again. Trent seemed to be interested too, because he slowed down when the roof came into view. It was a different person this time. He, like the last man, held a shotgun tightly, and kept a wary eye on us. Trent acknowledged the man with a slight nod and continued driving.

We were going to have neighbors. The second man on the porch had me convinced that my theory of this being a security outpost was right. I wondered if we were ever going to be able to meet our neighbors, or if they were always going to be known as 'those people over there' to us. I had visions of being able to trade stuff with them, but wondered if there would ever be a time of trusting people enough to interact with strangers. I wondered if the world of marauders and zombies was enough to turn everyone else into isolationists.

My brain twisted around these thoughts of meeting other people. Part of me was so excited about the knowledge that we weren't alone in the world. Yeah, I knew that we weren't the only people left no matter how much it felt like we were. I knew that there were little pockets of other people, there was no way we already came across everyone, but at the same time, I was afraid that the people that were left were like the people in Heartsvale. I remembered those television shows where people were preparing for the end of the world and created these bug out zones that were heavily armed. I wondered what would happen if we stumbled on one of those places.

I was still afraid of another marauders scenario. I was afraid that there were militias wandering around, roving bandits straight out of a Hollywood movie. Trent thought that the bulk of the marauders would probably have died out as the people that they took advantage of were less available. I had my doubts. I had visions of little bands of the morons banding together to form larger groups. I pictured a swarm of locusts going from crop to crop.

Sometimes, when I slept, I had dreams of them. The dream usually started with me on watch, and in it, I saw them on the horizon heading our way. In my dreams Alexus always led the pack and they went house to house looking for us. I thought it was interesting that in my worst dreams, I dreamed of the living. I held that fear close, not telling anyone that I preferred to deal with the zombies.

I must have fallen asleep for a moment, because before I knew it, we were bouncing on the dirt road and approaching the house. The gates yawned open to let the truck rumble through. Drew ran down the porch and across the patches of grass that refused to die. Louise waved from the door to the back yard, relief etched on her face at seeing her son alive. Trent slid the transmission into park and set the parking brake. I swung the door open and slid off the seat. By the time my boots hit the dirt, Drew wrapped his arms around my waist. I hugged him back and put my chin on the top of his head.

"Did you kill a lot of zombies? Are we gonna live in the town? Is it safe?" Drew fired his questions off in almost a single sentence. He pulled away from me and looked up at me with shining eyes. His face was lit from inside with joy and hope. His enthusiasm gave me renewed energy. I ran my hand through his hair, playfully messing up his hair. Trent walked around the front of the truck to join us. He leaned against the filthy fender and chuckled softly.

"Yeah, we're going to live there. We have to build the wall and make sure that the place is still clear after, but this is going to be awesome. There is even a school and you have about a year of missed homework to do."

Drew's eyes opened wide in mock horror. "I did do my homework, but a zombie ate it."

Trent laughed and opened the door to the back of the extended cab and hefted the cooler out. He took it to the house and into the kitchen. I heard a squeal from the kitchen and knew Louise found out what Trent took inside. We picked some vegetables in the garden. We ate an early dinner and shared the highlights from the trip. We played up the best parts, the football field, the medical station, the café. The fish spoke for itself and the stories of the yards with various gardens and fruit trees were the icing on the cake. We went on and on about the many houses and how much space we were going to have. If hope was a tangible thing, it would have coated everything in waves, wrapping everyone in its warm hugs. I couldn't help but to wonder though, how many others had that little spot in their stomachs like I did that was afraid of the hope. It was like a splinter in my brain that reminded me that since the start of this there was little that went according to plan. Plans and us were like teenage lovers, full of drama and usually ended in tears.

Trent left for Wilsall with Matt after we were done eating. I took watch after the truck rolled out of the gate and I watched him drive off for as long as the landscape allowed me to, and stayed staring at the place he disappeared from for a few more minutes when Derek walked up to me.

"How ya doin' Cal?" Derek's warm eyes were filled with fatherly concern. I tried to smile at him, but it came out as a crooked weak attempt.

"I hate seeing him drive off. I always did even well before the zombies, but it's harder now." Derek nodded gently.

"I have a feeling that you two didn't tell the entire story at dinner. You never were any good at hiding the whole truth. Wanna talk about it?"

I looked at the open door that led into the hallway. I could hear the kids squealing as they played a game of tag that spanned the entire house.

"Yeah, but not here. Wanna go on the roof with me?" Derek agreed, and we both climbed out the window and sat on the roof of the porch that came right under the window. We sat down and I looked at the gun that was sitting between us. I took a deep breath. "I gotta start with this, there's nothing wrong with the place. I'm sure I have a look on my face that says I'm seeing the worst case scenario. Wilsall is perfect. I think my malfunction is that I'm scared that if there is something good out there, then it means that there is a good chance there is someone out there that will want to take it. I wonder why such a neat little place is still available, if there is something that I'm just not seeing that we overlooked. There were more than a couple zombies trapped there, but whatever on that. It's work, but not serious work, kind of like dealing with an outbreak of ants."

"Really stinky ants," Derek quipped. I laughed.

"Yeah, really stinky ants." I sighed. "But, like I said, ants are a whatever. They just need to be taken care of. We did an immediate area scope out to make sure that there were no very close by neighbors and we didn't see anything, so that's cool, but the one sign we did have of the living was on the way there and back. About halfway, more or less, there was this little shack that was near the road and there was a man standing guard there. It was this little run down place, and he didn't do anything but stand there with a gun in his hands as he watched our couple of cars roll by. Then on the way home, when we passed the place again there was another man. Same thing happened, he just started at us, but it has me wondering, what are we in for? There are other living people out there and I don't know what we are getting ourselves into with neighbors that know we are there." I paused to reach back into the window to grab my water bottle. I unscrewed the cap and took a drink. "We are about to make a lot of noise in the area with building our wall. Everything living and dead is going to know that we are moving in. You can't stealthily build a wall of shipping containers. Like we talked about, the dead are just annoying, but can be taken out. Other people, though, are a different story all together."

"I miss the old days sometimes," Derek began. "When you were about to move into a new neighborhood you could sit in front of the house you were thinking of buying and watch the neighborhood. You could Google the schools and the crime statistics and make sure you weren't moving to some psychotic place. Now we have to roll the dice and pray that we didn't just move to the middle of hell."

"What if we
are
moving next door to the militia from hell, Derek? What if there is some local band of loons that are going to follow the guys to the town when they get the shipping containers together and hurt them? What if..."

Derek cut me off there. "'What if' is a dangerous game, you know? You can 'what if' yourself to the point of insanity. Do you really see anything helpful about that? Now this isn't to say that you should never try to look at the big picture and figure out the potential problems and solutions, but if you let yourself go to that dark place where no one wins, all you’re doing is hurting yourself."

I sat staring at the horizon for a while and watched as the sky glowed in the pinks and purples of the sunset and the stars began to appear in the darkening sky. A soft fall breeze blew by, carrying a few leaves with it. Neither one of us spoke while his words were sinking into my brain.

"Cal, we'll cross problem bridges as they come up, if they come up."

"Derek, what if we are leading the group to be slaughtered because we grew tired of living all together under one roof?"

He sighed. "I know. That thought has been in my head, too. We very well could be. I have to believe though that there has to be more to living through the end of the world that just being on this side of life. What was the point of fighting to survive if we are going to live like rats in a nest, cut off and half starved? What kind of life would I be dooming my kids and grandkids to if we never moved beyond this little place? If we go insane being trapped all together with the sounds of the dead moaning and scratching at the fences, what would the point have been? We are caterpillars in a cocoon right now. Right at this very moment, we need this place. We need the safety of the cocoon, but the time is coming very soon that if we don't break out, we are going to suffocate in it. We knew long ago that this place was not long term sustainable."

"Derek, you know you and Trent sound alike right now, right?"

"Yeah, well, what can I say. I raised my kids right." He clapped his hand on my shoulder a couple of times. "Alright kiddo, you go on in and go to bed. You look tired as hell."

I leaned over and gave him a hug and ducked into the house. I cleaned myself up and changed into my pajamas. I told everyone goodnight before I made my way back to my room and climbed into the bed. I was lying in my bed when I heard a soft knock at the door. I sat up and turned on the light before I called out to come in. It was Drew, looking very tired in his mostly outgrown pajamas.

"Mom? Would it be okay if I stayed with you tonight?" His voice was soft and shy and very much reminded me of the little boy that he was. I pulled back the covers on Trent's side of the bed and invited him in. I held on to my kid tightly and we were both asleep in minutes.