“Fire? A fire? Here in the hospital?”
“Not in the hospital. A fire out there! In the forest! I’m sure of this.” Prit’s voice caught in his throat.
I trusted my pilot friend. After years of fighting wildfires, he could detect the faintest hint of a fire, fires the average person wouldn’t notice. I didn’t smell anything, but if the Ukrainian said he smelled smoke, that was the end of the discussion. The question was how it would affect us.
“It’s blowing in on the wind. Come here,” the Ukrainian continued.
“We should go take a look.”
“Yes.”
We stared at each other. The Ukrainian shook his head, and I cussed under my breath. We both knew what came next.
Shit, I thought. We had to get back out there. We had to stick our nose out of our little hole, whether we liked it or not.
After we’d made that decision, we headed back to Numantia to bring Sister Cecilia and Lucia up to speed. The look of dread on Lucia’s face when she heard what we were planning was almost comical.
As she helped me get into my patched wetsuit, she nervously chattered away nonstop, reminding me of a thousand things not to do. “Don’t take any chances, don’t go into dark places, don’t go near anything suspicious, don’t wander too far from Prit…”
I tried to calm her down, for my sake as well as hers. I was getting more nervous by the minute. Lucia isn’t a hysterical person, but the possibility that something would happen to us outside that refuge really got to her.
Finally, Prit and I were ready. We were armed with assault rifles the army had left behind. I was also carrying the speargun across my back, with a spear loaded and two more strapped to my right calf. The Ukrainian, decked out in an awful fuchsia tracksuit so bright it hurt your eyes, had a huge hunting knife tucked in a holster. He chewed some gum mechanically and was surprisingly calm.
We agreed that the best way out was through the elevator shaft. We wouldn’t have to go back through the dark hospital, plus it was the fastest way out. Once we were in the storeroom on the top floor, all we had to do was open a window to get a view of the entire valley surrounding the hospital.
We soon discovered that climbing up the elevator cables was harder than it looks in the movies. They were covered in grease, and the noise we made as we climbed should’ve attracted a legion of those monsters. But as far as we could tell, things were going our way. At least for a while.
After struggling to the top floor, Prit eased the elevator door open, ready to duck back inside at the first sign of danger. I kept the cable as taut as possible. If there was trouble, we could slide back down to the ground floor.
Prit slithered behind the door like an eel and disappeared out on to the upper floor. For fifteen long seconds, I didn’t hear a sound. Just when I thought my nerves would snap, the Ukrainian slipped back behind the door and signaled that the coast was clear. Strangely clear.
For the first time in months, I felt sunlight directly on my skin. It felt so good that I stood stock still for a moment, enjoying that wonderful sensation. We were standing in a warehouse on the top floor. From there we’d ventured out into the ambulance garage. Sunlight was streaming in the heavy metal gate trucks used to drive through, which had been left wide open during the evacuation. That discovery made my stomach clench. With that door open, there was nothing to keep the undead from wandering around this huge room. But there wasn’t any sign of them.
Prit and I peered out. It was a beautiful late summer day. Although the sun was shining brightly in a cloudless sky, the windchill from a strong north wind made it very cold. That wind also carried the strong smell of burning wood. Even I could smell it now.
My gaze swept nervously from side to side as I tried to detect any suspicious activity, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. Only dozens of birds darting everywhere, completely disoriented. The air was so charged with electricity it almost crackled.
Suddenly Pritchenko elbowed me in the ribs. I looked in the direction he was pointing. Over the hills at the end of the valley, about a mile away, rose a thick column of smoke. Enormous black spirals twisted and turned with a fury. An evil glow dyed the horizon orange, adding a sinister, surreal touch to the landscape.
I stood there, horrified at what I saw. A fire. A huge, uncontrollable forest fire. A couple of days before, a strong storm with a lot of thunder and lightning but no rain had hit in the area. Maybe lightning from that storm started that fire. Or a gas cylinder left out in the sun for months. Or a hundred other damn things I could come up with. No way to say for sure.
All I knew was that with no one to fight that fire it was reaching terrifying proportions, destroying everything in its path. As if someone had read my thoughts, a powerful explosion shook the air. A huge orange fireball rose over the horizon. The fire had just devoured a car, probably more than one, given the size of the explosion. That fire was becoming a monster.
Then I suddenly remembered the strange lack of undead in the area. I wondered if something had warned them to escape the flames. Wouldn’t surprise me. Those creatures seemed to be driven by the same basic instincts as animals. One of the most basic impulses of nature is self-preservation.
Somehow the undead had perceived the danger and left for safer areas. Or maybe the flames had trapped hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. Even so, there’d still be millions of those lost souls wandering around. No, the fire wasn’t the solution to the problem. It posed an even greater problem. And we survivors certainly didn’t need any more problems. We could hardly keep our heads above water as it was.
A couple of wild boars ran out of the tangled patch of weeds the front garden had become and raced across the deserted parking lot, fleeing the wall of flame. Prit and I looked at each other. The animals were following their instincts and getting the hell out. We should follow their example. You didn’t need finely honed instincts to figure that out. One look at the edge of the fire and the direction the wind was blowing told us that the hospital would be engulfed in a couple of hours, four at the most. There was no time to lose.
We quickly rounded the southern wall of the hospital toward the parking lot, where we’d left the SUV months ago. I remembered I’d left the passenger door wide open, and a couple of those things had gotten inside. We didn’t know what we’d find, but we were pretty sure the SUV’s battery would be completely dead. I wasn’t sure I’d turned off the headlights when I dragged Prit out of the car. Just in case, at the bottom of my backpack was a brand-new battery we’d scavenged from the ambulance repair shop.
As we rushed around, switching the new battery for the old one, I felt a strong sense of deja vu. It was the same situation we’d lived through months before, when we landed at the port of Vigo. Only now we weren’t flying blind like before. And we didn’t have a bunch of armed Pakistanis hovering over us. That made a huge difference. I wondered what became of the crew of
The motor coughed a couple of times, hesitated, then started up. Just then, the first flames broke over the hills near the hospital. The sky was bright orange, and the smell of smoke was getting stronger. The wind had picked up, and the temperature had risen a couple of degrees. The situation was getting uglier by the minute.
We drove around the building without seeing a single one of those monsters. Crunching on the dry gravel, we pulled the SUV up to the tunnel leading to the storeroom. Prit waited in the car with the engine running while I shot down the greased elevator cable to the bottom floor.
Sister Cecilia and Lucia were waiting near the elevator car, looking really worried. You could smell the smoke in the basement now. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw wisps of smoke floating in the light of the magnesium lamps.
I quickly brought them up to speed. A huge fire was approaching the hospital. There was no way to contain it; it would reach us in about an hour and would burn the place to the ground. Even the undead had fled as fast as their battered bodies would take them. We had to get out now, or we’d be burned to a crisp.
Their reaction was more serene than I’d imagined. I’d had a mental image of a meltdown or even an outright refusal to leave the safety of the basement, but they took the news in stride. Lucia went to retrieve the emergency backpacks we’d packed. The nun asked if there was a way to unlock the elevator and get it back in operation. “There are many things this nun can do,” she said, “but climbing up a cable covered in grease is not one of them. So move your butt, my son, or you’ll have to take me out the long way, and that would take too much time.”
I smiled, shaking my head, too impressed to speak. Those two were made of strong stuff. They had to be to have survived on their own for so long and endured that hell without getting devoured. Where big, hairy-chested
