Degeneration (28 page)

             
Richard
spotted the pistol. It was lying underneath the hospital bed next to him.
He crawled underneath the bed as quickly as he could
, keeping pressed
tightly
against the wall.
He grabbed
the pi
stol off of the floor
, but didn’t turn around.
Instead, he continued crawling underneath bed after bed
, terrified
.

T
he patients h
andcuffed to their headboards
thrashed wildly
in their beds as Richard crawled underneath
.

Richard
managed to distance
himself from the
CDC
whi
te-suit by ten beds in that manner when his path was blocked by a glass divider that separated
a section of
the room
. He
gritted his teeth,
turned,
and aimed
the pistol shakily at the
CDC
white-suit
standing ten beds away.

             
The CDC white-suit stood
frozen
and looked confused. He appeared
transfixed by his
own
shadow
on the wall provided by the flame’s flickering glow. He stared
at
his
sh
adow with his arms hung
limp
at his sides
, unaware of Richard’s presence
.

             
Richard
slowly lowered hi
s gun. The smoky air was irritating his sinuses and made his eyes water. He tried to hold back a–

He
sneezed
and the sound
echoed throughout the room, rising above the sound of the snarling shackled infected.

             
The CDC
white-suit’s head
snapped
to
wards Richard
.
He
charged toward
s him, hurling
the hospital beds out of his way
in the process
, ignoring the handcuffed patient’s feral protests
as they were flung across the room
.

             
Richard
hurriedly
aimed the pistol
at the advancing white-suit and
fired
multiple times
.

The rapid gunfire cast the CDC white-suit in white strobe from the muzzle-flash as he dove towards Richard, arms flailing.

Richard
kept firing relentlessly until he exhausted his ammo
.

             
The
CDC white-suit stumbled forward and collapsed
against the glass
divider.
His bullet-riddled body left a bloody streak as it
slid down
the glass and landed next to Richard.

Richard
scooted away from the corpse and sat
trembling in his own urine. He forced himself to stand, shakily slid a fresh clip into the pistol, and chambered a round.

             
Fighter
jets passed overhead and
the entire room
shook once again
. Something inside the ceiling
conduits made an audible click
and th
e overhead emergency lights flickered back on
and the monitoring equipment next to the patient beds
powered back on as the computers rebooted. The smoke-filled
room slowly became filled with dulled light
and fire alarms started chirping once again.

Richard saw that hospital gurneys were lined across t
he opposite
side
of the room. Each bed had a corpse handcuffed to it, and each corpse had
been executed by a single gunshot to the head. T
he heads
of the handcuffed corpses undulated back-and-forth as the room
shook as the jets passed overhead. T
he
cardiac monitor
s
next to the beds
gave an alarm
tone as they all flat-lined.

Richard turned his head and looked towards a
set of double-d
oors, an exit
.
Gripping the pistol tightly, he ran towards the double-doors and burst through them into
the middle of
a long windowed hallway.

The hallway
was long and
st
retched out in both directions. One side of the hall
was lined with door
s and
large
soot-covered
windows and overturned benches
lined the opposite side
.
The windows were covered with thick soot from the outside that filtered out most of the light coming through.

Richard slid the gun under his belt and started
at the darkened w
indow
in front of him
.
He walked over
to the window and pressed his ha
nd against it. H
e couldn’t even see the ground below
through the soot.
He
picked up one of the benches lying in the hall
and
hurled it against the window.

The bench bounced off the window pane and landed in the middle of the hall while a web of fine glass crackles
formed across the broken safety glass. Small fragments of glass fell loose and pelted against the charred plastic tarp outside.

Richard
stared at the soot-covered tarp outside, confused.
He
reached
out and pressed his hand against the blackened plastic tarp. The charred plastic crumbled away with his touch and created a large hole.

He
st
epped back in horror as he peered
through the hole at the
downtown Raleigh skyline.

             
Most of the skyscrapers in the middle of the city were reduced to burnt steel skeletons
.
The skyscrapers along the edge of downtown were mostly intact and were covered by charcoaled plastic. The noon sky was hazy
wit
h ash
and black smoke
, and behind the downtown skyline
,
plumes of smoke rose
into the sky
from all
over
the city.
The building he was standing in appeared to be at the far edge of downtown sprawl and was afforded some safety from the inferno that had engulfed the heart of downtown Raleigh.

             
Far, far in the distance, he saw a flickering orange glow that extended across the entire horizon. Unbeknownst to Richard, he was staring at the military’s attempt to corral the outbreak many miles away.

The whole city is burning! And you’re stuck in the middle of it all!

Andy started to laugh
.

Some savior you’re turning out to be! I’m going to die in this fucking prison!

Richard shook his he
ad and tried to ignore Andy’s intrusive nagging
. He forced himself to
step closer to the window and look
down at the
hospital’s
parking lot five floors below.

The lot was full of
burnt vehicular skeletons
and
smoldering military transport vehicles
. Infected soldiers, civilians, and rescue personnel aimlessly shambled
amongst the vehicles and stepped across blackened
corpses. A
badly burnt man wearing a tattered suit stood
next to a
smoldering
police
van
and looked up at Richard, snarling
.

In the distance, a commercial helicopter took off from the roof of a low-rise apartment building. It banked away from the edge of downtown Raleigh and headed in an eastwardly–

Two fighter jets approached the helicopter and fired two missiles at it.

The helicopter erupted in a billowing explosion and crumbled to the ground in a cascade of flaming rubble.

Richard flinched from the flash of the explosion.

The infected in the hospital parking lot started staggering towards the helicopter crash site.

I’m never going to get my body out of that prison…

“You can’t say that for sure, Andy.”

Oh stop being so goddamn optimistic! Look outside!

“You’re i
nside a modern fortress
you–”

You really think you’ll find my body there alive
?

“I’m sure of it…”

Then get your ass to Butner and save me!

He turned and stared down the hallway. At the end of the hall, he saw an elevator.
He gripped the pistol in his hand and ran towards it.

A door a few feet ahead of him
swung open and a male nur
se stumbled out of the room.

Richard fired a volley of rounds at nurse as he ran continued to run towards the elevator.

The shot blew out the side of the nurse’s head and splattered gore across the wall. The nurse collapsed face-down.

Richard leapt over the nurse and continued sprinting.

Fighter jets flew overhead and caused the windows to rattle and plaster ceiling tiles to fall loose. The hallway lights flickered out as the power died once again.

Richard sprinted faster, sucking smoke-filled air into his lungs desperately.
A door swung open next to
him
and a
sweaty
hospital
security guard leapt out
into the hall
. The guar
d grabbed Richard by the sleeve, mumbling incoherently–

Richard
tore himself
free from the guard’s grip and kept running, pushing the frightened guard aside
.

Ahead of Richard, a CDC white-suit without a facemask st
aggered out of an open
room.
The white-suit bared his teeth and ran
towards him.

Richard jolted to a halt, aimed his pistol, and–

The white-suit pushed past Richard and tackled the security guard. The two men tussled on the floor until the guard gave out a horrific scream as the white-suit bit into his jugular.

Richard turned away from the two men and bolted to the
elevator
. He pressed the elevator call button repeatedly, but nothing happened. He panicked and searched frantically until
he found what he was look
ing for; he found the stairwell door.

He ran
towards the door when a
frantic pounding c
oming
from the other side of the
door froze him in place and made his stomach knot.

He glanced back
down the hallway and saw
a
growing
horde of
infected
nurses, patients, and
CDC whit-suits closing in on him.

He knew there was no going back the way he came.

He
turned
his attention back
towards the stairwell door,
aimed the
pistol,
held his breath,
and swung the door
op
en.

A man
, clothes blackened with soot an
d skin badly burnt–

Richard fired the pistol point-blank between the man’s eyes and shoved the man’s corpse out of the way
. He
ran
into the smoky stairwell
and slammed the door shut behind him.

He bounded down the stairs, hardly
slowing
as he passed the fourth
-floor and third-floor landings. His pace was reduced to a stagger on the second-floor landing, nearly suffocating on the thick smoke. He kept low as he crawled
under
neath
the black smoke
, coughing
.
He made his way to the first-floor and staggered back in horror.

Numerous s
oo
t-
covered corpses were huddled together n
ear the first-floor
stairwell door. T
hey were
not plague victims, but rather–

“Smoke inhalation,” Richard whispered
to himself
, throat raw from coughing
.