the belly and tied one end of the cord to his collar and one end to my wrist. Then I hung the AK-47 and the speargun across my chest and dragged Prit’s unconscious body out of the car.
The downpour brought the Ukrainian around. His groans signaled he was still alive but hurting like hell. Draping his arm over my shoulder, I started walking toward the access tunnel, holding the gun with my free hand and dragging Lucullus, who was indignant at being treated like a dog on a leash and at being soaking wet.
Our progress was painfully slow. Prit could hardly walk, and I was loaded down like a mule. Those few yards seemed like miles. The cat viciously yanked at the cord, trying to take cover from the rain. Every time he leaped forward, the bootlace dug into my wrist, sending waves of pain up my arm.
What a surreal picture we made! It occurred to me if an undead popped up, I’d have a hard time defending us, with both arms immobilized. That thought made me pick up the pace.
We reached the access tunnel in a matter of seconds. The glass roof over our heads amplified the heavy downpour. I twisted around, pulled the flashlight out of my pocket, and shone it toward the end of the corridor.
I leaned my shoulder against the emergency room door, and it opened with a soft hiss. I poked my head inside. The huge admitting room was in the shadows. A soft light filtered through large rectangular windows that ran all the way up to the ceiling. There were two bullet holes right in the middle of one of them.
The lobby looked like an abandoned slaughterhouse. Rust-colored blood was splattered across floor and walls. In some places it looked like someone had dumped large buckets of blood. The sweet, nauseating smell of dried blood mingled with the smell of decaying food…and stale sweat. It was subtle and faint but unmistakable. Human sweat. Someone had been sweating in that space, but I couldn’t determine whether it had been hours or months ago.
Everywhere, lying every which way, were cast-off clothes, used bandages, stretchers stained with dried fluids, and even a couple of defibrillators with their paddles dangling. It was not a welcoming sight, to say the least.
The most upsetting part was the dozens of bloody handprints and footprints crisscrossing every inch of that corridor. Many feet (and I mean a
I settled a nearly unconscious Prit in a wheelchair and untied Lucullus from my wrist and tied him to a radiator. Tying him up like that hurt his feelings. He was dying to explore that new place, but I couldn’t turn him loose, not knowing what we’d find.
There were bodies on the floor, of course, but fewer than outside. By some miracle, I avoided stepping on a woman inflated by the gases of decomposition. Most of those unfortunate people weren’t undead, just innocent victims the monsters had maimed so savagely they were beyond resurrection. The lack of corpses there was surely because most of the patients were now part of the giant brotherhood of the undead.
A sudden, loud metallic sound paralyzed me. Someone had run into a filing cabinet or a cart, then let out a drawn-out groan. The sound seemed to come from a couple of floors up, close enough to give me chills.
We weren’t alone.
I wasn’t about to walk around a dark, deserted hospital full of corpses just to identify the source of a noise. Whoever or whatever it was could have the whole place to himself. I was scared shitless just standing at the entrance. I couldn’t imagine heading into the bowels of the building.
I walked by the nursing desk. A dust-covered stethoscope lay abandoned on a pile of medical records. I couldn’t resist hanging it around my neck. When I was little, I used to “borrow” my mother’s stethoscope. I loved those things.
Suddenly I could picture myself in an episode of
I giggled hysterically. My God, all that shit was starting to go to my head. Next stop: schizophrenia.
Beside the check-in desk, next to some cubicles with the curtains drawn, was the emergency medicine cabinet. The door was caved in. I entered cautiously, treading on the broken glass that covered the floor.
It looked like a bomb had exploded in there. The steel cabinet where they kept morphine and opiates was shredded into what looked like flower petals. Someone had opened it the hard way, with an explosive, maybe a grenade off a dead soldier. The explosion had reduced the jars, vials, and medical devices to smithereens. A botched job. The work of someone looking for morphine or, more likely, a junkie who knew where to find opiates. I’m not surprised. It must be hard to score some horse these days.
I rummaged through pieces of broken glass for a vial in good condition, mentally repeating the list: antiseptics, antibiotics, gauze, painkillers (no opiates, since Prit had already maxed out on morphine), sutures, bandages, sterile needles.
I felt a jabbing pain in my hand and yanked it back. I’d sliced my finger with a sliver of glass as thin as a knife. I swore under my breath and put my finger in my mouth. The salty blood ran down my throat. I wrapped my finger absentmindedly in a butterfly suture and went back to searching, in a worse mood, piling my booty on a shiny aluminum tray.
That tray saved my life. When I turned around to set down a roll of tape, I saw movement behind me reflected in the metal mirror. I turned around like a snake and clumsily raised the AK-47. The bitter taste of fear rose from my stomach.
A decrepit old man, completely naked, with some of his intestines hanging out, was rocking back and forth, less than two yards from me, the right sleeve of his hospital gown rolled up. He opened his mouth in a mute roar as he stumbled toward me, stepping on the glass barefooted, feeling no pain. I was paralyzed with horror. The old man had no eyes. Although his eye sockets were empty, and two bloody streams slid down his face, he knew exactly where I was.
Everything happened in slow motion. I raised the AK-47 to his face. Curiously relaxed, I pointed the gun at his neck to compensate for the kick, something I’d learned from the Pakistanis. I let him get barely a yard away and pulled the trigger.
The bullet left a gaping red hole in the old man’s forehead. Splinters of bone, brain, and blood splattered the wall behind him.
The old man collapsed like a sack with a wet, gurgling sound, dragging along a pile of folders as he fell. The smell of gunpowder stung my nostrils, and a piercing whistle rang in my ears from firing in such a tiny space. I’d have a headache in the hours to come.
Once again, I’d had a close call. But that shot would’ve been heard for more than a mile. Every being, living or not, in the hospital would know we were there. Jesus, what a day…
As I calmed my heartbeat, I cursed myself. How could I have been so stupid? The speargun hung over my left arm. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry and as scared as a hysterical old woman, I could have taken out the old man with a silent spear instead of the noisy AK-47.
I’d had to act fast. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to think about the speargun. The assault rifle was the first thing I got my hands on, and I acted instinctively.
Now I had other things to worry about. The shot triggered a wave of sound throughout the hospital. Doors banged, things crashed on top of each other, something fell noisily to the floor (a stretcher?), and there were dull, muffled thuds against the walls. It was one lethal symphony. And most of all, the fucking groaning. How could I forget that? It was an indistinct, deep echo, as if someone was trying to talk but had forgotten how to move his tongue. It was impossible to explain the sound if you’d never seen those monsters. It’s a chilling roar, human and inhuman at the same time.
I scooped up all the drugs on the metal tray and ran back to where I’d left Prit. He was awake, sitting bolt upright in the wheelchair, his right hand cradling his left hand, which was covered in bandages. He was dazed by the morphine and white as a sheet, but otherwise fully conscious and alert. And scared. As fucking scared as I was.
He asked me what had happened and where the hell we were. Quickly, I brought him up to speed from the time he had the “accident” until I’d left him sitting in that chair in the middle of a deserted, dark room. Then I realized the tremendous shock he must’ve felt when he regained consciousness, all alone, wounded, in the dark, in a strange place filled with terrifying noise. If it’d been me, I’d have had a heart attack.
