LZR-1143: Within (9 page)

The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the loud clanging of a slammed door, and a body flew out from the basement doors, pressing itself against the door as it shut again.

Almost simultaneously, her ears rang with a scream of pain as Cam erupted in a blood-curdling yell. She flew from the desk top and away from his scream of pain, staring at the site of Beverly’s pale face latched on to Cam’s cheek. Even as he screamed and pummeled her with his fists, the skin of his face peeled slowly away from his jaw, and Bridget felt bile slam into the back of her teeth as his teeth showed through the jagged tear.

From across the room, someone yelled loudly, their voice a frantic plea for help.

And that’s when things got interesting.

Unknown to the people inside the large, windowless building, the power in the building had been cut after a large tractor trailer, traveling at nearly ninety miles per hour at the time of the impact, had sheered a power coupling in half four blocks away. The resulting impact severed the power feed to the building, and the large grid within which the building was situated.

However, the massive hospital one block away was a priority for the local government. In an admirable feat of governmental responsiveness, utility crews were dispatched—even during the initial confusing hours of the outbreak—to bring the hospital, and the rest of its grid, back online. Those crews had worked diligently, suspended high above the city streets in several different vehicles, to restore power and give the doctors and nurses of Harbor Island General the ability to help as many people as they could.

Tragically, these brave workers—many of who would ultimately perish from thirst or starvation suspended above the city streets—worked long after the results of their labor were in vain.

Harbor Island General was overrun merely two hours into the epidemic.

But the power was restored four hours later.

Precisely at the time that Beverly heard Cam scream.

Precisely at the time that Louis appeared from the basement below.

As the last two red emergency lights began to wane, and as Louis called across the cavernous space, the fluorescent lights far above the heads of the assembled night shift began to flicker. Simultaneously, five hundred computer hard drives began to hum within their housings, and five hundred monitors showed the static, monochromatic emblem of the installed operating systems. Bathroom lights illuminated empty stalls. Air conditioning systems began to spool up. A radio that had been playing softly on someone’s desk before the outage hissed its static rage. A clock on the wall far above their heads illuminated large red numbers.

And the outer doors, manually armed on a separate circuit but hardwired to reset when power had been restored, clicked softly in their housings. Steel beams retracted from the heavy frames and a horn blasted once, from inside the building. Outside the building, massive external floodlights—also programmed to automatically illuminate the entrances to the large building—shone on hundreds of assembled bodies, churning against the doors, and each other.

Inside the building, near the bottom of the large flight of stairs leading to the second floor, the man who used to be Rajesh pushed his broken, bloody frame up slowly from the dirty carpet. His dead eyes moved slowly in their sockets, and he fumbled to right himself on an awkwardly angled leg.

Had Rajesh been alive, he would have screamed in dire agony, as the shattered leg crunched with the effort. Shards of bone scraped against the carpet, catching in the weave as he slid forward on his two hands and one leg, bent over himself as if stooped with great age.

He didn’t know pain.

But he knew hunger.

Across the room, shouts drew his attention briefly. His nose sniffed at the air, and his ears rang with the sound of the screams. But he was motivated by immediacy, and the sounds that drew him now were those funneling through the doors so close at hand.

Had Rajesh been alive, his eyes would have read the words above the doors.

Exit.

He slid forward slowly, singular of purpose.

Had Rajesh been alive, he would have appreciated the simplicity of the locking mechanism.

He leaned forward, his crippled body weight pressing the bar of metal back into the door, and releasing the final latch from inside the building. The door opened slightly, a blast of putrid air wafting inside.

Rajesh stopped, knowing that no food called from this direction. He turned, moving toward the screams.

And as fingers found the space between the door and the wall and pulled the heavy door outward, his people followed along with him, the bright lights within the building now guiding their way.

***

They were motivated by food. That was what drove them forward. It is what moved their stiffened limbs and bloodless faces and forced their jaws together reflexively, in spasms of hunger and desire.

Although they couldn’t see as well as the living, their other senses appeared to be unaffected by the infection, and their hearing seemed to have improved—possibly as an effect of their ear canals becoming more rigid in death.

They moved slowly, but they were unrelenting and implacable. 

They were not deterred by exhaustion or fear. They could not be reasoned with, and they could not be deterred.

***

Louis blinked in the brightness, eyes flashing to the ground in pain before adjusting to the new-found illumination. A relieved breath caught in his chest as he briefly allowed himself the joy of hope; the satisfaction of a brief certitude that life had not irrevocably changed.

Behind him, fists hammered on the door, and he yelled in surprise, falling forward and catching himself. He ran, making toward the assembled group he could now see milling head and shoulders above the cubicles.

As he dodged chairs and desks running toward his colleagues, he noticed the disarray. Two men were struggling with a third person while the rest huddled around something on the floor. As he approached, and cleared the last obstacle, his words of warning froze in his mouth.

They were here, too.

Beverly thrashed on the floor, bloody teeth gnashing in vain as she tried to escape from the power cords tied tightly around her hands and feet. The two men stood up slowly and backed away, eyes wide.

In the cubicle next to her, Cam’s eyes were wide open, and staring at the ceiling, his mouth torn open from the cheek and face covered in blood and spittle. A large, motherly woman cradled his head in her lap as a widening pool of blood stained the carpet beneath her.

Bridget’s hand grabbed his arm in a vise-like grip, and his eyes snapped back to her face, dirty and smudged, as if someone had painted dark red war paint underneath her eyes. Eyes that had been staring toward the front of the building, watching what no one else had yet seen.

“What did you do?” she asked quietly, even as the others began to yell. Feet churned against the carpet as the assembled workers began to run through the narrow corridors.

“I … we couldn’t …”

There was no answer. None that he could give.

None that he could give, and remain a man.

Then, he saw what she was looking at and realized why she had asked the question.

And he too, began to run.

He heard her follow, as they both passed the bodies of Cam and Beverly, weaving between the cubes and into the straight pathway to the rear of the building. There were four stairwells, one on each side of the building. One led to the basement, while the other three only went up. But within each stairwell was an emergency exit door, leading to the outside.

Behind them, hundreds of people crowded into the large building through the single open door. Hundreds of people who had been drawn by the crowd—a crowd that had begun to form when a single cellular phone made a single ring inside a darkened building. A crowd that, for the most part, had filtered out of the opened, shattered and bloody doors of Harbor Island General Hospital next door.

It was a crowd that hadn’t existed several hours ago—a crowd that used to be people but were now mindless and desperate. A crowd that was always hungry.

Bridget and Louis sprinted, their thin legs and bodies unused to physical exertion growing weary before they reached the opposite side of the building. In front of them, Ty had reached the stairwell door and slammed it open, several women close behind him. He flew to the exterior door and slammed his shoulder against the thick metal, his hip pressing the latch and unlocking the mechanism.

Louis reached the stairwell door first, and between gasps for air watched as Ty pushed the door hard, meeting resistance from the other side. Too late, he croaked a weak “Stop!”

From outside the door, several hands lashed into the open space, pulling the young man through the gap and into the dawn beyond. Off balance and plunging forward, he could scream only once as he was pulled forward, headlong into a waiting crowd outside. Bridget screamed as she reached the doorway, watching as more flooded to the opening, quickly overtaking the large, motherly woman whose dress was still stained with Cam’s blood, and dragging her to the ground. Ty’s garbled and wet screams tore through the air, and the sounds of moans outside echoed in the stairwell. A single, detached hand flew against the door and fell sloppily to the cement floor as Louis backed out of the doorway.

Creatures stumbled on the two bodies, and the clusters of people around them, falling in clumsy heaps near the open door. Louis and Bridget scrambled back, heads whipping around, looking for the last stairwell.

It was across the building, but the crowd from the front was still filtering through the cubes toward where they stood now.

They didn’t speak.

They didn’t have to.

As one, they tore across the carpet, exhaustion and breathlessness forgotten, adrenaline pumping through their veins.

Their feet slammed against the cheap flooring.

Their breathing echoed against the incessant walls of plastic and tin.

Behind them, the crowd streaming in from the front doors had split. Nearly half of the creatures had followed the rest of the group to the other side of the building. Against the far wall, a small man named Joe, whose wife was expecting their fourth child, and who had been laid off from his job as an attorney merely weeks before and had gotten this job to pay the mounting medical bills, opened the door Louis had slammed behind him minutes ago. He was pulled into the stairwell, where Tiny waited with a large new friend, flaps of skin hanging uselessly from his large frame. The man who had been Antonio reached hungrily forward.

In the shadow of Robert’s screams, amidst the moans and the guttural cacophony, Louis ran.

In a men’s bathroom near the main entrance, an older woman named Peggy huddled crouched upon a toilet sprinkled with urine. The smell of waterless urinals invaded her fortress as she whimpered slightly in fear. Peggy, whose husband had so recently retired and who had dreamed of traveling across the United States in an RV, and who had only days left until her own retirement, cried alone in an empty men’s room. She thought of her six month old grandchild, and of her small dogs.

She thought of her life before. And she wept.

Outside the unlocked bathroom door, several creatures, slowed by the mass of flesh at the doors, heard her soft whimpers.

She screamed once when the door to the bathroom opened.

As Peggy’s cries for help echoed in the brightly lit madhouse, Louis ran.

In front of Louis, tears streamed down Bridget’s pale cheeks, streaking what was left of her makeup and making trails through the crusted remnants of Beverly’s blood. She tripped once, but pulled herself up, crying as she heard the sound of footfalls on her left.

The remaining half of the herd of creatures was paralleling Louis and Bridget’s headlong flight, hemmed in by a wall of cubicles. Merely ten feet away in some places, their ruined faces and bloody arms tracked the two as they sprinted for their last hope, which was drawing inexorably closer.

Louis watched as at least five of them dragged down the last of the customer retention reps, who had tried to hide in a cubicle but had been discovered. Multiple bite wounds adorned her arms as she pinwheeled onto the floor, overtaken and overwhelmed. They fell on her like lions on a gazelle, and a fountain of blood—Louis assumed it to be from a severed artery—streaked into the air and against the flat screen monitor several feet away.