Jeff…that would be a bad thing.'
The crowd stood around Kevin and time was sliding by slowly, finally Kevin took a deep breath, and lowered his gun, he put the safety on, as he had been taught earlier the previous day and put the gun in his pocket, before turning away from Jeff to face Hank. 'Probably. Yeah, you are probably right. You can explain to me how letting him,' he pointed at Jeff, 'have a gun is a good thing though? The fucker didn't even aim Hank, he didn't aim! Something should happen to him, some sort of punishment.'
'Yeah, you're right. Jeff? No more guns for you until you learn how to control yourself, give it to one of your friends to carry for now.'
Jeff looked for a moment like he wanted to argue, spying the crowd he knew better and handed it over to Doug, who pointedly put the safety on and tucked it behind his back in his belt.
Another member of the crowd yelled out, 'What, he shoots one of us and gets off with having his gun taken away? I say we boot him out!'
The crowd seemed to follow this sentiment and after only a few seconds they began jeering Jeff and working themselves into a frenzy. Hank finally relented and asked a couple of them to put Jeff into one of the management offices, away from everybody else until they could decide what to do with him.
'Okay, okay, lets calm down, we'll deal with this mess later when we are all more awake and calmed down. A couple of things for now though; First check your fire people, if you cannot see your target, do not fire your gun, we clear on that? Second someone needs to explain to me just how the hell this happened in the first place, I mean where were the guards?' Everyone started talking about how the guards worked and debating on how to make it better so this would not happen again, Hank leaned in to Kevin he spoke softly under the babble of the crowd, 'Why don't you go get the doc to look you over, and Kevin?'
'Yeah Hank?'
'Thanks for not shooting that asshole.'
Chapter 21
The night passed quickly, but not uneventfully. The group at the hospital was busy for a couple hours after sunset going through all the rooms in the eastern wing of the hospital where they had taken up residence. There were no fast zombies on any of the floors, but they did run into maybe eighteen slow ones that had to be put down, most of these were previously the elderly or people in for major operations, as zombies they made for a decrepit group, easily taken down, yet disconcerting too. No one, it seemed, wanted to cap grandpa or grandma in the head. Juan watched the crews move into the rooms and took his own turn leading the others into the various rooms to 'clear' them too.
Their group formed a wall with the vehicles they had to block off the emergency room doors and throughout the night they kept this area well patrolled and clear of zombies too. Towards the morning this area had drawn the attention of a lot of zombies, in fact it was pretty much a raging battle. Juan had not slept all night, he felt mildly euphoric when the sun finally peeked above the horizon. They had limited their shooting as much as possible, so as not to draw even more zombies attention, but there was a crowd of probably fifty to sixty zombies milling about outside the wall of vehicles. Juan was not sure how they would be able to get out without opening a hole in their line of defenses.
Probably they couldn't do it, however no one had said anything about leaving, in fact most of the crew who had stayed here over night were quite content with staying where they were, the beds were far better than the floor of the Mike's Club and the rooms all had heavy doors too. The doors could be busted through, but anything trying that would at least make a lot of noise.
Right now Juan was on solo duty behind the wall, they had found having too many living humans also drew the attention of the zombies, but one or two people under moderate cover created only a small 'draw'. Juan smelled the coffee long before he heard the emergency room doors slide open in back of him. As Nanci walked up behind him he sniffed in appreciatively and said, 'Ah mi amor, gracias. That smells wonderful!'
Unseen Nanci stiffened, then said, 'How did you know it was me?'
Laughing Juan imitated Hank's southern drawl and said, 'Darling you have been bringing me coffee every day for the last twelve years, who else would it be?'
Still a little unsure, Nanci said tentatively, 'Juan, you know, the others, well Charlie, he said something happened to you?'
Juan scowled 'Me? No I am alright, nothing bad happened.'
'Charlie didn't say anything 'bad' happened to you, but that he saw you after…after you killed one of the zombies and you, well you looked different is all.'
'You think I look different?' Juan asked, raising his eyebrows. 'I hope my pants are two inches too short, I could use a little height.'
Nanci smiled then looked him over more closely, 'Yeah, something is different, I can't say what it is, but there is like an air about you now, something different.'
'That's helpful.'
Punching him lightly on the shoulder Nanci said, 'You hungry? They would not let me cook, they have it handled, so you get whatever they make, but Terry said you'd like it.'
'How is Mary doing? Anybody check on her?'
Nanci frowned, 'I don't think she is doing so good, they wouldn't let me see her, that is not a good sign. I'll ask Terry though, when I get breakfast, I saw her coming out of Mary's room this morning when I got up. I thought you were going to come to bed last night?'
Shrugging his shoulders Juan replied, 'Shit. Too bad about Mary. I just never really got tired last night, I am still not so bad now. How was the bed?'
'Lonely.' purred Nanci, 'but better than the club, the door was great, it shut out all the noise, did you guys shoot last night?'
'No, well a couple times, maybe three, mostly we just batted them if they came over or under the cars. We gotta watch that truck' Juan pointed at a four wheel drive truck with several bodies underneath, 'it is too high off the ground, they keep trying to get under it. We shouldn't have put it there as part of the wall. I think it is worse than the humvee would have been. It has gotten really quiet now, I think they have learned not to try and get in here.'
'Well we can move the truck today once we figure out what the plan is. Let me go get breakfast, and I will send someone out here to relieve you so you can come in an eat and maybe sleep a couple hours too.'
Seeing Juan nod, Nance went back inside and made her way to the kitchen where Charlie, Jack and Terry were standing drinking coffee and several other yawning residents were eating at some of the tables.
'Well?' asked Jack.
'Nothing, he is hungry, that's all.' Nanci replied.
'He hasn't noticed anything weird yet then?' Charlie pressed her.
'No, if he did he didn't say anything. We got more food ready? He'll come in and eat and then you can see if anything changes.'
'It will, you'll see.' said Jack. What they were talking about was the fact that over the course of the night several people had noticed that if Juan was on guard the zombies tended to hang back and not attack, which is exactly why Juan was out there alone now. He had been 'on watch' for almost two hours and not a single zombie had tried to get past the line of cars. Some of the others who had stood watch with him, Charlie included, had noticed that the zombies never seemed to try and attack Juan, they just ignored him, treated him exactly like he was one of them.
'Alright, let me get a couple-three of these guys to go cover the exit and we'll bring Juan in. Terry there is grub right?' asked Jack.
'Oh sure, for everyone and probably more. Anyone seen the army guys yet this morning?' she counter
