When There's No More room In Hell: A Zombie Novel (12 page)

In his state, it took him a long time to make
it back to the gable end of his house. The knotted bed sheets still hung from the roof and he felt a wave of relief at having made it. He could still hear the shuffling and moaning of the crowd around the corner in front of his house, but it no longer seemed to bother him. He had made it home.

He gripped the rope with his good hand and tried to pull himself up. Immediately, what little strength he had left failed him and he tumbled back, losing his grip and landing hard
against the concrete. He raised himself to his knees. With hands on his thighs he breathed deeply, gathered his strength, and assaulted the wall and rope once more, using his damaged hand too. The hand failed to grip and once again he fell.

Determined not
to give up, he tried and tried in vain to climb the rope, all the time becoming weaker with each assault. Eventually he became too weak to even climb back to his feet to try again and he dragged himself to the wall. He leaned against it and quietly sobbed, knowing he was doomed.

His legs had lost the strength to move and his arms were useless. His vision blurred and he opted to just close his eyes and wait. The fever seemed to subside and his he
ad stopped aching. A feeling, almost of euphoria, swept over him as he accepted his fate. He rested his head back against the wall and drifted in and out of a delirious state for the rest of the day. His body was numb; he felt no more pain and in the brief moments of clear thought he found himself remembering happier times.

Images of his childhood and his younger days
, on holiday for the first time without his parents, flitted into his mind. His friends’ weddings, birthday parties and Christmas and New Year celebrations, the women he had known, and for a moment, he wondered where they were and if any of them were okay.

During the middle of the night he had a moment of clarity. He felt nothing and it seemed as though it was just his mind that was still alive. His eyes watched the starry night sky, blinking in the cool air that brushed against them, savouring the feeling of the breeze on his face. He could feel his life
-force ebbing away; there was nothing he could do about it. His body was dead, and he knew that the rest of him would soon follow.

As he stared in
to the night air, his final breath escaped his lungs with a long sigh. His eyes closed and his head slumped, still and lifeless.

Andy Moorcroft was dead.

10

The hospital had
been closed off and a defensive perimeter was placed around it. Anyone who found themselves inside when the gates were closed soon realised that they were a permanent resident, for the time being at least.

The soldiers and police were to protect the people and patients inside and
, regardless of the injury or emergency, no one was allowed in or out of the perimeter. The hospital was in lockdown mode. The idea was that as soon as adequate transport and manpower, as well as a secure location became available, the hospital would be evacuated. But in the confusion, it seemed to have been forgotten.

For a whole week, the gates remained closed and a steadily increasing crowd of infected pushed and tried to force their way through the gates and barricades. G
unfire became a part of everyday life; the soldiers having to constantly fend off attacks, or to try and thin out the crowd and the weight against the perimeter walls.

People had stopped approaching the hospital in the hope of treatment and protection ever since the inciden
t on the second day of the lockdown when the soldiers, becoming nervous and seeing a particularly rowdy crowd of people as a threat to the integrity of the safety barrier, had opened fire, killing three of them in the process. Now all they could see was the slowly decaying mass of flesh that relentlessly pressed itself against the barricades.

The grounds were large and
, having also been a teaching hospital, there were more buildings than usually found in hospital complexes. Even though there were plenty of rooms and accommodation, with the number of soldiers and police, patients, doctors and nurses and the many people who had sought sanctuary there before the gates were closed, overcrowding had become a problem.

People
fit themselves in wherever they could, and with the initial influx of people and lack of a cohesive chain-of-command and method of control and quarantine, it was inevitable that infected would slip through. Also, people dying from natural causes, with the main bulk of the police and army busy guarding the perimeter and wards, it was hard to police each individual group of people.

Outbreaks of the infected would spring up suddenly and soldiers would rush
in to bring control back to that particular area. It was widely suspected that the troops took no chances, and any building that had an outbreak was liquidated.

Still, the doctors and nurses of the hospital controlled the wards of patients and they maintained their oaths and cared for the sick and the dying. Even though they had seen time
and time again what happened to a bite wound or anyone who died, they insisted that everybody deserved the utmost in care and treatment while they still lived.

Terry was a poor ex
cuse of a man in society’s eyes; he always had an excuse and never failed to find time to sneak off from his ward duties to snooze or have a sly cigarette.

Being a porter wasn’t really a career choice, but more of a job he
’d landed in. He had no interest in doing the best he could and was always looking forward to getting paid and getting to his local bar. He found it ironic that he was actually in a job that was all about caring when all he cared about was his next drink, which was something he never tried to hide.

The way the doctors and nurses treated him
, and looked at him, as he crossed paths with them in the halls and corridors of the hospital, was proof enough to him what type of person they all thought he was, and he bitterly accepted it and believed it himself.

He had never been married and had very few friends. After he left home at the age of sixteen, he had pretty much cut himself off from what family he had and set about trudging through an existence that he neither asked for nor wanted. Life to him was a burden
, and it seemed to take forever.

Leaning against the wall by the fire exit, Terr
y was having a smoke break when the commotion in the hospital started. He ran his nicotine-stained fingers through his greasy brown hair. His physical being showed the signs of a dishevelled, heavy drinking and chain smoking man who had long since given up on himself. The oversized porter uniform that hung from his skinny, narrow shoulders and reeked of stale smoke, the lines on his dry, haggard face, all showed an age far past his actual thirty eight years.

More from curiosity than concern, he flicked away the strained cigarette butt and pushed through the fire exit
. He followed the noise and commotion to its source. Screams, shouts and the sounds of crashing and banging had become the norm within the hospital.

The brightly lit corridors were packed with hysterical people; doctors, nurses and patients alike. He found himself pushing his scrawny frame through the bedlam. Screams seemed to fill the corridors and Terry soon realised that he was the only one heading in the direction of the
commotion. People bumped into him, spinning him like a coin, yet he still headed in the direction from which they came.

He spotted a doctor rushing towar
d him.

“Doc, what’s going on?” H
e tried to grab him by the arm, but the man didn’t seem to have any intention of stopping and pulled away. Terry saw that he was terrified, and watched as he fled towards the exit, his lab coat flowing behind him as he burst through the door and into the sunlight.

Not actually thinking why he was going against the rest of the crowd, or why his fight or flight instincts weren’t doing their normal flight behaviour in accordance to Terry’s nature, he found himself at the epicentre of the carnage.

A ward had been kept to one side for the infected and the dying, with the doctors hoping to be able to deal with the corpses before reanimation, but someone had dropped the ball. The doors had been battered down and corpses had rushed into the rest of the hospital, tearing through patients and staff alike.

He
stood in an open area that had corridors leading to it, which further along, was the ‘Doomed Ward’ as they had begun to call it. The infected filled the corridor from one wall to the other and stalked their way along it toward Terry. He could see commotion further within the crowd as one or two faster moving corpses pushed and shoved, trying to reach the front of the column to get to the living first.

On realization of his situation, Terry turned to follow the panicking
nurses and doctors only to find blood-covered infected patients and hospital staff blocking his route back to safety as they poured up through a stairwell from a lower floor. He was cut off. Everything seemed to slow down for a split second and he found himself taking in what he was seeing and still not believing it was happening, or that it was possible.

The eyes of the infected where not that of wild people but of people in some kind of shock
, and if not for the blood and flesh hanging from their mouths and wounds, or splatter on their clothes, they wouldn’t have looked so threatening.

Terry came back to his senses as one of the bloodied figures lunged at
him. Side-stepping the fat half-naked, gore-covered female patient, he rushed for a set of double doors and burst through, hoping to be able to make it to the exit only to find more carnage and atrocities going on over the floors of the corridor. He ran past scenes of brutality that he would never have thought possible. Blood smeared the walls and floors, the screams of the infirm that had been left to their fate clawed at his ears.

He reached a T-junction
, glimpsed behind and saw that a large group was closing in on him. He turned to look if the corridors to the left and right were clear, when a sign to the right caught his eye.

Instantly, a sinking gut
-feeling hit him hard and he realized he had a choice to make. The sign said ‘Maternity Ward’, and he knew that just past the next doors and to the right, a room housed the incubators full of newborn babies, defenseless against the barbaric atrocities that he had seen throughout the hospital.

His body was aching to just turn and run for the exit that was only fifty meters in the opposite direction and clear of any threat, but he knew he had to act, and there was no one else to take the brunt of what needed to be done.

Tears formed in the corners of his eyes as he contemplated his fate and the fate of the babies.

Terry mumbled in a nervous low shaking voice, “I can’t leave
`em, God, I can’t leave them.”

He turned to the bloodthirsty mob and screamed, “Fuck you, I'm not leaving them. You've
got to fight me first.”

With tears streaming down his face, he did not run but marched with purpose through the double doors
; the ward was deserted of hospital staff. They had fled in blind panic and left the young babies to die. Terry felt disgust rise inside of him. They had spent years looking down on him and judging him as an arsehole, and now it was them who proved themselves to be the moral cowards.

He rushed along the corridor to where he knew the incubators would be. He turned and fo
rced his way through a glass door to the right leading into a room full of peacefully sleeping infants, totally oblivious to their own agonising fate.

He stopped for a moment, and the sounds of the little babies gurgling, whimpering and snoring almost dropped him to his knees. In contrast to what he had just witnessed, the room was like an oasis
of tranquillity in a sea of madness.

Pushing over a large set of metal shelves in front of the door, he knew it wouldn’t keep them out for long but he needed to stall them. He searched desperately with his eyes, pleading for an option of escape for him and the babies. Even if there was a route out, there must have been more than twenty full incubators in the room. There was no way he could save them all.

The now sweating and distraught porter started to push the incubator trolleys to the other side of the room as the first hands of the pale-blooded, vile-looking figures started to bang on the glass of the large viewing window and the door, pressing their faces against the panes and gnashing their teeth, which clanked on the glass, making the hairs on Terry’s neck stand on end.

Terry stood his ground in the va
in hope that the soldiers stationed at the hospital perimeter would come to his rescue. He could hear gunshots in the distance but they sounded like they were outside the main building. From the sound of things, the chaos had spread throughout the entire hospital complex.

Within a few minutes the glass door and the windows that spanned the length of the room were covered with the horrific faces of the infected. The thumping of fi
sts on glass, of grinding teeth, was unbearable to him and the babies who began to cry hysterically. Terry looked around; the babies somehow knew that there was danger. 

“You fucking bastards
,” Terry yelled with tears flowing down his cheeks. With all the children pushed into the corner he stood in front of them like a frantic goalkeeper ready to take on whatever came his way.

He turned to try and comfort the little soft
-skinned babies, speaking in a quiet soothing voice. “Okay, Terry will look after you, sssssshhhhhh. Terry won’t let them take you.”

At that moment
, the once unreliable porter heard the cracking of the glass and the scraping of metal on tiles as the shelving slid across the floor. The door was forced open due to the sheer weight of the mass behind it.

He turned toward the crowd as they pushed
their way inside, staggering into the room and heading for Terry and the babies. Wiping his face dry on the back of his hand, Terry whispered, “Come on then you bastards,” so as not to alarm the children or let them hear him swear. He almost laughed.
So he wasn’t a complete arsehole after all
.

The first
bloodied body staggered towards him and he hit it with full force in the mouth, knocking it to the floor. He grabbed a metal tray that sat on a table by the wall and pelted at the head of the next to reach him, knocking it to the floor and swinging for the next.

A yellowed wrinkled hand grabbed his arm and he pulled away just as the gaping black maw of what had once been a young woman bit into his hand, severing the skin on his
fingers and almost stripping them to the bone. He screamed, feeling the teeth clamp over the fingers and shear the skin from them as he pulled away. The pain was sharp at first, and then became a burning sensation as hot blood gushed from the wound and trickled down to his fingertips.

A
couple more creatures tumbled forward over the first that fell. He swung and thrashed with a ferocity that a wild tiger would be wary of, but the things just didn’t care and kept on the same steady pace and momentum. He spat and gasped as his tar laden lungs fought for air, while his limbs used up every bit of oxygen he had until they began to burn with the build up of lactic acid. Kicking and punching, he tried to keep them at bay and away from the defenseless babies that wailed behind him.

His head spun and his mouth was dry
; every part of his wiry frame burned and felt heavy with exhaustion, but he kept on going. Not even able to open his mouth, he knew his body was failing as the things kept biting and pulling at him. One of them alone didn’t seem much, but every time he knocked one down, another took its place, sinking its teeth into his flesh.