pastures—apparently alone, some believe due to a divorce. The good doctor quickly stumbled upon the motley group of survivors in Woodbury. Seeing the ragged inhabitants gripped by sickness, malnourished, and many of them nursing injuries, Stevens decided to offer his services. He’s been busy ever since, operating out of the former Meriwether County Medical Center three blocks from the racetrack.
On the afternoon of his seventh day in Woodbury, still wheezing, every breath a stab of pain in his side, Brian finally gets up the nerve to visit the squat, gray-brick building on the south end of the safe zone.
“You’re lucky,” Stevens says, snapping an X-ray into its clip at the top of a light panel. He points at a milky image of Brian’s ribs. “No serious breaks … just three minor fractures to the second, fourth, and fifth pectorals.”
“Lucky, huh?” Brian mutters, sitting shirtless on the padded gurney. The room is a depressing tile crypt in the basement of the medical center—once the pathology lab—now serving as Stevens’s examination room. The air reeks of disinfectant and mold.
“Not a word I’ve used that often in recent days, I will admit,” Stevens says, turning toward a stainless steel cabinet next to the light panel. He’s a tall, trim, smartly groomed man in his late forties with designer steel-frame eyeglasses riding low on the bridge of his nose. He wears a lab coat over his wrinkled oxford shirt and has a sort of weary, professorial intelligence in his eyes.
“And the wheezing?” Brian asks.
The doctor fishes through a shelf of plastic vials. “Early stage pleurisy due to the damage to the ribs,” he mumbles as he searches the medication. “I would encourage you to cough as much as possible … it’s going to hurt, but it’ll prevent secretions from pooling in the lungs.”
“And my eye?” The stabbing pain in Brian’s left eye, radiating up from his bruised jaw, has worsened over the last few days. Every time he looks in the mirror, his eye seems more bloodshot.
“Looks fine to me,” the doctor says, pulling a pill bottle from the shelf. “Your mandible on that side has a nasty contusion, but that should heal up in time. I’m gonna give you some naproxen for the pain.”
Stevens hands the vial over and then stands there with arms crossed against his chest.
Brian almost involuntarily reaches for his wallet. “I’m not sure if I have—”
“There’s no payment for services rendered here,” the doctor says with a raised brow, somewhat bemused by Brian’s innate gesture. “There’s no staff, there’s no infrastructure, there’s no follow-up, and for that matter, there isn’t a decent cup of espresso or a half-assed daily newspaper to read.”
“Oh … right.” Brian puts the pills in his pocket. “What about the hip?”
“Bruised but intact,” he says, flipping off the light panel and closing the cabinet. “I wouldn’t worry. You can put your shirt back on now.”
“Good … thanks.”
“Not a big talker, are you?” The doctor washes his hands at a wall sink, dries them on a dirty towel.
“I guess not.”
“Probably better that way,” the doctor says, wadding the towel and tossing it into the sink. “You probably don’t even want to tell me your name.”
“Well…”
“It’s okay. Forget it. You’ll be known in the records as the Bohemian Fellow with the Cracked Ribs. You want to tell me how it happened?”
Brian shrugs as he buttons his shirt. “Took a fall.”
“Fighting off the specimens?”
Brian looks at him. “Specimens?”
“Sorry … clinical-speak. Biters, zombies, pus bags, whatever they’re calling them nowadays. That how you got injured?”
“Yeah … something like that.”
“You want a professional opinion? A prognosis?”
“Sure.”
“Get the hell outta here while you still can.”
“Why’s that?”
“Chaos theory.”
“Excuse me?”
“Entropy … empires fall, stars wink out … the ice cubes in your drink melt.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”
The doctor pushes his glasses up his nose. “There’s a crematorium in the sublevel of this building … we destroyed two more men today, one of them the father of two children. They were attacked on the north side yesterday morning. They reanimated last night. More Biters are getting through … the barricade’s a sieve. Chaos theory is the impossibility of a closed system remaining stable. This town is doomed. There’s nobody at the controls … Gavin and his cronies are getting bolder … and you, my friend, are simply another piece of fodder.”
For the longest time, Brian doesn’t say anything, he just stares past the doctor.
At last, Brian pushes himself off the table and extends his hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
That night, woozy from the painkillers, Brian Blake hears a knock at his bedroom door. Before he even has a chance to get his bearings and turn on a light, the door clicks open and Nick sticks his head in. “Brian, you awake?”
“Always.” Brian grunts as he climbs out of the blankets and sits up on the side of the bed. Only a few of the apartment’s wall outlets are live with generated power. Brian’s room is a dead circuit. He switches on a battery- operated lantern and sees Nick pushing into the room, fully dressed, his expression tight with alarm.
“You gotta see something,” Nick says, going to the window, peering through the blinds. “I saw him last night, same deal, didn’t think much of it.”
Still groggy, Brian joins Nick at the window. “What are we looking at?”
Through the slat, out in the darkness of a vacant lot, Philip’s silhouette can be seen emerging from the far trees. He looks like a stick figure in the darkness. Since Penny’s death, he’s been losing weight, going without sleep, hardly eating a thing. He looks sick, broken, like his faded denims are the only things holding his long, lanky limbs together. He carries a bucket, and he walks with a strange, wooden kind of purpose, like a sleepwalker or an automaton.
“What’s with the bucket?” Brian asks under his breath, almost rhetorically.
“Exactly.” Nick nervously scratches himself. “He had it last night, too.”
“Just take it easy, Nick. Stay in here.” Brian turns the lantern out. “Let’s just see what happens.”
A few moments later, the sound of the front door clicking open reverberates through the dark apartment. Philip’s shuffling footsteps can be heard crossing the living room and making their way down the hall.
The click of the laundry room door is followed by the sound of Penny becoming agitated, the chain clanking, the garbled sounds of groaning—noises to which Brian and Nick have almost grown accustomed. Then something reaches their ears that they haven’t heard before: the wet slosh of something hitting the tiles … followed by the strange, animalistic, gooey noises of a zombie feeding.
“What the fuck is he doing?” In the half-light, Nick’s face is a pale gibbous moon of terror.
“Holy Christ,” Brian whispers. “He can’t be—”
Brian doesn’t even get a chance to finish the thought, because Nick is on his way to the door with a full head of steam, heading for the hallway.
Brian chases after him. “Nick, don’t—”
“This isn’t happening.” Nick barrels down the hallway, moving toward the laundry room. He knocks hard on the door. “Philip, what’s going on?”
“Go away!”
The sound of Philip’s muffled voice is clogged with emotion.
“Nick—” Brian tries to get in between Nick and the door but it’s too late.
Nick turns the knob. The door is unlocked. Nick enters the laundry room.
“Oh God.”