Randall smiled. “Not as good as I chainsaw, but I can pull a trigger.”
Clay hesitated, then walked back to him.
“Here.” He didn’t believe he was doing this, but he handed him Alice. “Four rounds left. She kicks like a mule. Make sure nobody you care about is behind whoever you shoot—or even in the next room.”
Randall looked from the Taurus, to Clay, to the Taurus again. “You sure?”
“Take good care of her. Don’t make me regret this.”
He took one last look at Alice, then turned and walked away, wondering if Randall had enough left in him to get Jenny out on his own. Maybe not.
“Be back ASAP to help you find Jenny,” Clay called over his shoulder.
“You don’t have to do that,” Randall said.
“Yeah, I do.”
BENNY the Clown was sad again.
He hurt.
His teeth were gone.
Half of his tongue was also gone, and it made new blood while he licked up what was on his clown suit. His whole mouth was leaking faster than he could lap up the new blood. The taste had made him happy before, and he still wanted
He realized that one of his siblings was gnawing on his leg. This made Benny the Clown even sadder.
It was an old woman. Very old. He could kill her.
Benny the Clown killed her.
He drank her blood.
He was happier now.
But it didn’t last. He hurt again.
He hurt so bad that he wanted to rip his face off.
He tried, just a little, but it didn’t make him feel better.
Not at all.
Benny the Clown got up and walked down the hallway, looking around for something to make him happy. The screaming didn’t make him happy. The sobbing didn’t make him happy.
Nothing made him happy.
Except…
He looked at the thing on the floor. He seemed to remember something like it. One of his friends used to juggle them. Or was it his mentor? If he remembered correctly, somebody got badly hurt juggling them, and the other clowns had been sad, even though it was kind of funny.
He picked up the chainsaw and began to lick the blood off the blade.
CARLA relocked the double doors and pushed the dressers back into place.
What a night.
The outbreak.
The doctors gone.
A woman dying on her watch.
Another young woman, by herself, that patient already at seven centimeters.
Could things get
There was a part of her, growing stronger by the minute, that just wanted to hole up in a supply closet and wait for help to come.
But she couldn’t do that. She had patients depending on her.
A sudden scream erupted from one of the private rooms.
She ran down the hall, the noise getting louder.
Room 12.
Brittany.
Maybe she was finally fully effaced and ready to push?
Carla opened the door. “How we doing, Brit—”
Brittany was pinned to the bed on her back by a little girl.
“Hey!” Carla shouted.
The little girl turned and looked at her and…hissed through a mouthful of hideous canines, her face a bloody wreck.
Carla backpedaled involuntarily out of the room as the little monster hopped off of Brittany and crawled in her direction on all fours, coming faster and faster, talons clicking on the linoleum.
“Lock yourself in, Brittany!” Carla screamed as the girl rose up on two feet and sprinted toward her.
The door to Room 12 slammed shut and Carla heard the deadbolt turn as the little monster leapt at her, talons pointing toward her like a full set of knives.
Hiss-screaming.
Carla lunged out of the way as the girl crashed into the nurses’ station.
The Murray’s baby daughter was screaming at the far end of the corridor, and Carla scrambled back onto her feet and hauled ass toward Stacie’s room as the girl-monster climbed out of the nurses’ station and came after her.
There was a delivery cart against the wall, and she opened the top drawer and grabbed the first thing she touched, a pair of episiotomy scissors—”bajango scissors” she called them on better days. She closed the scissors, took them by the end, turned, and threw them toward the little girl, knowing, even as the blades left her hand spinning end over end and catching glimmers of that weak, blue light, that stuff like this only worked in bad movies.
The little girl suddenly stopped ten feet away and went quiet.
She looked down at her chest where the scissors were embedded, and then up at Carla, and she made a sound like a mewling cat or a depressed banshee.
There was an extension cord in the bottom drawer of the delivery cart, and Carla pulled it out, her hands shaking as they unwound the twist tie.
The little monster-girl sat in the middle of the floor. At first, she’d been trying to pull the blades out of her chest, but her own blood seemed to be distracting her now.
Carla approached slowly.
“I’m Carla,” she said. “What’s your name?”
The monster screeched something unintelligible.
“Well, I’m a nurse, and you look like maybe you’re not feeling so well.”
She was five feet away now, and getting her first look at this perversion of a child, wondering what kind of a virus could cause this. Something worse than Ebola.
Carla had grown up on a ranch ten miles from here, and by God she’d hogtied a calf or two in her day. No this wasn’t anywhere near the same, but similar principles applied. Flip her on her stomach, hard and fast, knee digging into her spine, and get the cord around her wrists. Tie her ankles last.
Three feet away now. She squatted.
God, the closer she got, the more awful this thing looked. This wasn’t a little girl. Not anymore.
Carla slowly uncoiled a four-foot length of cord, the monster eyeing her now with the distrust of a psycho cat, and licking the blood seeping out of her chest with a long, spongy-black tongue.
The Murray’s baby wailed now, grinding down Carla’s nerves.
She had to get back to Stacie.
Now or never.
She tightened her grip on the extension cord and lunged at the little monster, but it recoiled with terrible speed.
Carla felt something puncture the skin of her left arm, and by the time she looked up, the little girl had fled
