Degeneration (24 page)

The soldiers kept their gasmasks on and their weapons ready as they stood their ground. They didn’t allow a single person to cross the quarantine line.

Suddenly, somewhere deep in the crowd of
frightened crowd of
civilians,
a man who had been steadily coughing
collapsed to the ground and turned
.

The infection spread
like wildfire along the clustered interstate and
the people panicked.
The crowd
trampled
through the soldiers, toppled
the
wooden
barricad
es, and climbed over
the tan
ks as they ran towards freedom.

A squadron of F-16s responded quickly and
firebom
bed
both northbo
und and southbound lanes of I-85
. Flaming corpses flailed off the sides of
the interstate and collapsed
along the medians.
The rest of them
died
where they stood
and
collapsed atop the melting asphalt
amongst
countless
burnt vehicular skeletons.

             
At 7:30 A.M., the small town of Knightdale fell.

             
By 7:51 A.M. a squadron of USAF
B-1 Lancer
’s started corralling the massive red zone in a wall of flames. After the red zone was fully encircled in napalm, additional waves of bombers would keep the flames amply fed with white phosphorus.

             
At 8:2
8 A.M., a lon
e tank rolled along
Milbrook Street
in a Raleigh subdivision
, flattening abandoned vehicles and crushing
corpses sprawled out across the pavement. Debris and scattered
red flyers detailing
FEMA Safe Haven locations blew
freely along the road
as the tank passed
.
The driver of the tank was coughing, feverish, and struggling to breathe. His suit’s oxygen canister had run dry hours ago so he took off his helmet.

The other three soldiers inside the tank were already dead. They suffocated inside their oxygen-depleted white-suits. Even in the very end, they didn’t want to remove their helmets and breathe the toxic air.

The driver erupted into a spasm of coughing and wiped the fever sweat off of his brow.

The tank
veered around
two
abandone
d police cars that were haphazardly
parked on the sidewalk with their blue lights flas
hing and their windows smashed
. Next to the two cars, an electric utility sign
surrounded by sandbags
flashed
a message
in flickering
green
letters:

FEVER CHECKPOINT

1 MI AHEAD

ALL TRAFFIC MUST STOP

The tank passed
a smoldering overturned fire truck
and turned left onto
Lynn, driving past a
massive pile
-
up
.

A
n empty ambulance
sat next to the pile-up with
its rear doors
open. The doors swayed
in the
morning breeze and the inside
of the ambulance was splattered with dried blood and gore.

The tank started to swerve as it drove off the road and veered into a park. It crushed a swing set, rolled through some picnic tables, and rolled into Lake Lynn.

A startled gaggle of Canadian geese took flight as the tank sunk to the bottom.

A new day had begun.

15

 
             
T
he overhead fluorescent ligh
ts were dark when Richard awoke. A single
wall-mounted emergency
lamp
in the corner of the room bathed
the
windowless hospital room in dim yellow light. T
he scent of smoke hung
thick
in the sour air
.
He groaned,
rubbed his aching head, and sat-
up
with a wince.

His IV hung
dry and flat
.

He grabbed the r
ed call button that dangled from
the monitor
ing equipment beside his gurney and mashed it, but t
here was no response from the intercom. He
mashed it again, but was met with the same silence
.
He stared at the monitoring equipment on the cart and saw that it was dead.

His head pulsed with pain as his withdrawal symptoms worsened. He reached his hands up and roughly massaged his temples. The whispering inside his head started to surface and sounded like fingernails grating against a chalkboard.

Muffled in the distance out in the hallway, he heard somebody laughing.

Groaning, he swung his feet to the floor and stood
, keeping a supporting hand on his bed. T
he gurney rolled away from him
and his head spun with sudden vertigo.

He
staggered backwards against his IV pole and sent it chattering against the floor. The IV tube ripped out of his arm and the needle spurted a few drops of blood onto the tile floor. He steadied himself
and
looked
over at Terry.

Terry’s face was pale and his clothes were soaked with sweat. He was still deep in an uneasy sleep.

T
he hospital room sh
ook
violently and the metal gurneys rattle
d as fighter jets flew over the building. P
laster ceiling
tiles shook loose and shattered
against
the floor
.

The laughter in the hallway intensified.

Terry shifted in his sleep and rolled over onto his side
, coughing
.

             
“Nurse!” Ri
chard hoarsely yelled.

             
You’re all alone, Richie.

             
“
Shu
t up and let me figure this out, Andy,” Richard said to the intrusive voice. He knew that the voice wasn’t real, but it was real enough to be an annoyance.

Terry shuffled on his gurney
again.

Four gunshots echoed from the hallway as the laughter rattled on manically.

Ri
chard ran towards the door,
tripped over an overturned stool, and collapsed against the
medical monitoring equipment cart. T
he cart overturned and the
computer
monit
or shattered against the floor.

He stumbled over the toppled cart and
reached for the
light switch. He flipped it on-and-
off
to no avail
.

You’re all alone and they left you to die in the da
rk.

“Shut the fuck up,” Richard hissed
at the voice
. “Nurse!” h
e screamed again, panic evident
in his voice.

Outside in the hall, he heard more gunshots.

He
turned the doorknob and
opened the door
slowly
.

             
The
hallway was s
plotched with blood and the floor was caked with dried vomit. The overhead fluorescent lights
flickered weakly
as they operated on the emergency generator’s dwindling power reserves
. An
overturned supply cart was toppled
in the middle of the hall and its contents were sprawled out
across the floor
a
mongst
tattered bloody bandages. Most of the patient room
s had their
doors
opened
, but
a few of them were barricaded
by
overturned
hospital beds
. Two
m
angled corpses were sprawled
in the
middle of the hall next to the toppled supply cart, one was
an elderly
man
an
d the other wore bloodied nursing scrubs.

The maniacal laughter bellowed out from one of the rooms.

             
“Hello?” Richard timidly called down the hall
.

A
teenage girl
stumbled out of one of the open rooms
at the end of the hall and stopped in the middle of the hallway. She stared
at the ceiling, mouth agape,
with
blo
od smeared all over her
hospital gown.

“Hello?” Richard repeated
, voice shaking.

The
girl
turned towards
the sound of his voice and snarled.
D
ried gore
was
smeared around her mouth and matted into her
long
hair.

A chill ran down his back and he froze in place
.

The girl sprinted
towards Ri
chard in a rabid frenzy, tripped
over the overturned supply cart, and slid across the tiled hallway. She quickly
leapt back onto
her feet and continued
her mad dash towards him
, screaming loudly.

Richard ran back into the room,
s
lammed the door shut,
and fell backwards on
to the floor. He scooted across the floor and pressed himself
against
the wall, panting. He stared at the
door with wide-eyes.

Terry groaned and sat-
up in his gurney,
letting
his
sweat-soaked
sheet
fall
to the floor.
He erupted into a spasm of raspy coughs.

             
“
What is your problem?!” Terry
hoarsely
shouted, glaring at Richard with blood-shot eyes.
A dribble of blood ran out from his left nostril.

Richard looked over at Terry, mouth open, lips quivering
, but words wouldn’t come out
.

Terry looked arou
nd at the room, disoriented.

“What’s going on?
Is the power out?
” Terry asked.
He doubled-over in a violent spasm of coughing.

The girl started
franti
cly pounding against the door
, making both Richard and Terry startle.

             
“
Quiet!” Richard hissed
as he slowly got back on his feet.
He
stumbled to the table
between the two gurneys
and reached for the TV remote with
a shaky hand
.

             
Terry swung his legs off of the gurney and
steadied himself against the gurney, coughing.
He slid the pulse monitor off
of
his
finger and stared at his empty
IV. He pulled
the IV needle out of his arm. “W
hat the fuck is going on
!
?”

Richard r
epeatedly
clicked the ‘power’ button on the rem
ote, but the TV remained dark and t
he pounding
against the door grew louder.

             
“I don’t know
!
Just… be quiet and let me think!
” Richard
yelled as he threw the remote
o
n
the bed.
He
paced and stared
down at his trem
bling hands. He spotted the hospital
phon
e that Terry had thrown earlier on the floor. He snatched it up
and cradled
the receiver against
his ear.

             
“
Dead,” Richard announced as he dropped
the phone back to the floor. “What about your cell phone?”

             
“My what?” Terry wheezed, disoriented and in shock.

             
There were more gunshots in the distance.