He extended his Kindle and in the glow of the light, watched a skinny, gray rat waddle around the corner.
It stopped, sniffed the air, then turned to face Adam.
He tripped over his feet backing away from the rat, which was scurrying toward him now, its head nothing but massive brown fangs that were snapping shut with increasing ferocity the closer it got.
Adam climbed to his feet, thinking,
So he kept backing away as the thing came toward him, squeaking and hissing, and after twenty feet of this, he was starting to feel ridiculous. He had the scalpel in his pocket, but that didn’t seem feasible.
“Oh you stupid, ugly rat!” he said.
There were a few chairs along the wall outside of radiology and he picked one of them up and lifted it over his head and brought a wooden leg down on the rat’s rear haunches with a juicy crunch, blood and entrails exploding across the floor.
He lifted the chair again, the rat still scrambling toward him with its forepaws, albeit slower, and crushed its head and teeth and brains, over and over, until it was nothing but a soup of furry, gray-pink globs.
Adam charged on ahead, rounded the next corner, the realization coming that if he didn’t find the lab in the very near future, his wife was going to die.
He was running now, suddenly found himself at the end of the corridor, staring at the word LABORATORY in block letters over a door inset with glass.
He rushed in, past a waiting area and reception desk, through an exam room, until he reached the lab.
Almost no light remained.
He negotiated several desks, work stations and tables boasting microscopes and centrifuges, until he came to a tall refrigerator in the back, still humming off some battery power.
He pulled open the doors and knelt down, letting the weak light fall upon the trays of blood bags, labeled by type.
A+…A-…B+…B-…AB+…AB-…O+
O-positive, yes!
He slid out of his backpack and ripped open the main pouch.
Loaded in six units of chilled O-positive.
He zipped up, stood up, started out of the lab, then stopped.
Hmm.
Ravenous as these things were, maybe it wouldn’t be such a terrible idea to stock up on a little more blood.
No.
A
He transferred the units of O-positive into a smaller pocket, started loading the main pouch with as many blood bags as it would hold, and when he finally zipped the backpack and hoisted it onto his shoulder, it sagged with the weight of thirty units.
Adam started running, made it out of the laboratory and halfway through reception, when his Kindle light finally faded to black.
He froze, waited a moment, thinking his eyes would adjust, that he would be able to see
His first instinct was primal, animal panic, a sense of the walls both closing in and spinning until he’d completely lost his bearing.
He left his Kindle on the floor and moved forward with his arms outstretched until they touched the glass inset of the door. Fumbled for the handle, found it, pulled the door open.
He stepped out into the corridor, turned left, wandering down the hall with one hand outstretched, the other trailing along the wall. Seemed to take forever to reach the end of it, but his hand finally touched the intersecting wall.
He prayed as he walked in the darkness, prayed Stacie would hold on just a little longer, prayed for the safety of his new daughter, prayed for his own—
He stopped.
A noise echoed through one of the corridors behind him—a snarling-hissing, soft at first but getting louder, and then the click of footsteps—no, not footsteps, talonsteps—became prevalent.
These weren’t rats, and there were more than one.
A legion of them.
The fear paralyzed him, his first instinct to run, that sightless disorientation setting back in, his heart racing as they drew closer.
He slid out of the backpack.
Felt around for the main pouch’s zipper in the dark, ripped it open, pulled out one of the cold blood bags.
Still couldn’t see a thing, but he heard the sound of talons sliding across the linoleum, those demons skidding as they rounded the corner, wondered how they could still see.
The things that had murdered the nurse up on the third floor had obsessively licked up every drop of blood. This was either going to work, or he was going to die horribly in about ten seconds.
His fingers struggled to tear the pack, but the plastic was too thick, and then he remembered.
Dug the scalpel out of his pocket, and the moment he drew the blade across the top of the plastic bag, those demons started screaming.
Adam shouldered the backpack and came to his feet, backpedaling, holding the blood bag by the top.
He slung the bag into the darkness, heard it hit thirty feet down with a splatter, and as he turned and sprinted through pure darkness, the shrieking of the demons filled the basement of the hospital, their screams resonating inside his head, and he knew that even if he survived this night, never in his life would he forget that sound.
He crashed so hard into the next wall, he felt his shoulder pop, but he didn’t stop to think about the pain, just righted himself and kept running, gasping so hard for breath he could no longer hear what, if anything, pursued him, and then he crashed into another wall, felt certain he’d bruised or fractured his arm, but all he could think was,
Dark.
Dark.
Locked.
Dark.
Locked.
Breathing normally again, finally, but he could hear something coming now, the horrific clicking of the talons just around the corner, one corridor back.
He picked up speed, and ten feet later, came to the next door, which he pulled.
It swung open.
His eyes burned in the flood of light and he rushed into the stairwell and up the steps as the door closed after him.
