Outbreak: Boston (37 page)

“A-Are you okay?” he asked at last. Frays drove as fast as she dared down the street following the sheriff’s directions. Adam spared a glance at Frays and wondered if she heard him or not. The Humvee lurched around a car in the middle of the road.

“I’m fine!” Frays shouted, spearing the man next to her with a harsh look. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep your eyes on the road?” Amy swerved around another wreck and ended up smacking into another truck on the other side of the road. Eamon shouted angrily, but they could not make out exactly what he said over the noise of the radio.

The Humvee slowed to a stop when it came to the intersection of MA-62 and the turnpike. Frays slowed the Humvee to a stop at the top of a gentle rise and looked at the crossroads before them. She and Lacey exchanged nervous glances. The turnpike was jammed with cars, just like it was where they tried to cross it before. “Hang on, Eamon!” Adam shouted as Amy started down the road, accelerating gradually as the truck approached the stalled vehicles “This is gonna fuckin’ suck!”

The Humvee careened from one vehicle to the other as it pinballed through the intersection smashing the smaller, lighter civilian vehicles out of their way. The passengers in the truck jostled and bounced around the inside of the Humvee. They somehow made it across the turnpike in one piece and onto the street in front of the hospital. Amy slowed and pulled into the parking lot of Emerson Hospital.

Lacey and Frays looked around the parking lot through the windscreen of the truck as Amy drove up to the emergency room entrance. “I…don’t think anybody’s home.” Adam said quietly as Amy stopped the truck. She took a deep breath and frowned then got out of the vehicle. Lacey noticed that she left the engine running.

“C’mon, man. Hurry up!” Frays called as she pulled her M4 out of the rack next to the steering column and hustled to the rear of the Humvee. “Eamon, stay here with Rodriguez. Me and Lacey are going to check the hospital out. We’ll be back in about ten minutes. Hopefully, there’s somebody here.”

“Just hurry up!” Eamon nearly shouted as he leaned out of the truck. He ducked back in side for a second and checked Frannie’s vitals again. He squeezed the unconscious woman’s hand tightly before returning to the back of the truck. “She doesn’t have long, Amy. Please, just hurry up and find me an operating room. If you can’t do that, then she needs O positive or AB blood, if there’s any that’s still good.”

Amy put a hand on the man’s bicep and gave him a sympathetic look, suddenly reconsidering her plan. “The building’s too big. We can’t clear the whole thing by ourselves, man.” Frays said regretfully. Her eyes flitted towards her friend lying on the stretcher in the back of the truck then she looked around for a second. “Can you go with me? We’ll need to find some instruments and you’re the only one of us who knows what we’re looking for.”

Eamon looked at Frannie for a second then back at Frays. “I guess I have to.” he said with a frown as he
carefully picked his way over Frannie then climbed out of the truck. He glared at Lacey as the two men exchanged places. “Make sure you keep her warm and hang that IV up. Check her vitals every couple of minutes.”

Adam smiled
nervously at the man. “Sure thing, man. You guys just be careful and get back here quick, alright?”

Frays nodded. “Alright. I’ll take point. Let’s get going.” Amy said as she started moving towards the sliding glass doors of the emergency room lobby. The doors did not open when they came near so Frays slid her M4 around on its sling and pushed them open. The two of them moved inside the lobby and stopped in their tracks. A half second after they were inside, the automatic door mechanism seemed to kick in as the doors whooshed shut behind them.

The lobby looked like a drunken tornado had hit the place and vomited corpses all over on its way through. Eamon tried his best to breathe through his mouth, but the smell of perhaps several dozen month old dead bodies stuck its fingers in his nose and kicked him in the stomach. He gagged a couple times and leaned against the wall just inside the door as he threw up on the carpet.

Frays grimaced as she entered just behind him and looked around. “You alright, buddy?” she asked quietly while covering the area with her carbine. The dead did not seem to mind the mess the man was making, but the combined stench of the bodies and vomit made her stomach want to do backflips. The sound of Eamon’s retching was not helping at all, either.

Eamon rinsed his mouth out with water from his camelbak and spat. “Yeah.” he whispered as he recovered. “Let’s go.” The two of them crossed the room and pushed through the double doors across the room in front of them, leaving the lobby as silent as they left it. A few moments after the doors whooshed shut a hand twitched over here, a mouth opened and closed almost reflexively over there. Slowly, agonizingly, a slumped and pained figure pulled itself clumsily to its feet. Followed by another. And another. And another.

Frays and Eamon moved quickly but carefully down the hall down a sort of hall made from the curtains blocking off the examination tables in the emergency room. The florescent lights in the ceiling flickered and buzzed overhead, throwing crazy shadows all over the curtains.
The emergency generator must still be working.
Amy thought as they made their way through the room. There was hope then that the hospital’s blood supply would still be refrigerated. Thankfully, they seemed to be the only things moving in the ER. The two of them came to another set of doors leading to a hallway that went off to their right and left. There was a number of brass placards mounted to the wall with the names of the various departments of the hospital on them and arrows pointing either way.

“Which way, Eamon?” Frays asked as she scowled at the signs. She knew what some of them were, but she was not even sure the rest were in a language she recognized. The medic glanced at the signs and pointed to the left branch of the hall.

Amy nodded and started off, her carbine in the low ready position as she led the way. She could not get over how quiet it was as they moved through the hospital: the only sounds were their footfalls and the buzzing of the flickering lights in the ceiling. They came to another split in the hallway: would they go straight, right or left?

“Amy, hold up.” Eamon said quietly, as if he too was aware of the strangeness of the whole situation. He glanced at the signs on the wall across the way. “Take a right. It looks like we’re almost there.”

Frays cleared the corner and started down the hall when a figure in what looked like dirty nurse’s scrubs stumbled out into their path. The lights in this corridor flickered off and on so Amy squeezed the pressure switch glued to her M4’s handguard. The figure did not flinch as the powerful little light flashed in her bloodless face, revealing a bite mark on the woman’s shoulder as her hands started grasping for the two humans halfway down the hall from it.

The airman took a half step to her left, pressed the light switch again and centered the red dot of her weapon’s sight in the middle of the creature’s forehead. Even with the homemade suppressor, the shot was very loud in the confines of the hall. A loud thump and a shuffling sound like feet on the tile floor reached them from around the corner.

“Oh…fuck.” Eamon muttered under his breath. The two of them looked at each other for a half second before Frays brought her weapon back up and held it to her shoulder with the pistol grip. She pointed from Eamon to the corner and urged him on with an insistent look. She walked backwards to keep the area in front of them covered while Eamon moved up to see what made the noises.

A dozen figures shambled towards them, groaning and stumbling over debris scattered all over the floor. “Fuck! Amy, little help here!” Eamon shouted as he brought his shotgun up to his shoulder and fired. The nearest creature’s head disappeared in a spray of fluid and bone fragments as Amy backed up, lowered her weapon and pivoted on her heel and brought her carbine back up.

Eamon fired till his shotgun went dry. He struggled to dig a fresh magazine out of his pocket and reload the weapon but both slipped out of his shaking hands. “Hurry up, Eamon!” Frays shouted over the ringing in her ears “Get your gun back up!” There were more zombies coming out of the woodwork and it was all she could do to keep the panic rising in her chest out of her voice. She was about to tell Eamon to break and run for it when the fat medic screamed.

A zombie had snuck up behind them and had its arms wrapped around Eamon, forcing him to the ground. Blood squirted from under the creature’s jaws, a dark crimson puddle spreading on the floor as it bit and tore at the back of the medic’s neck and shoulders.

Amy lowered her weapon and snapped off two quick shots into the back of the creature’s head. She quickly glanced around her then shifted the barrel of her carbine over a little. “I’m sorry.” Frays whispered and pressed the trigger, putting a round through Eamon’s head before the man’s corpse could begin to come after her.

There were still more of them coming down the halls from all directions. She looked around for a second then grabbed Eamon’s medical bag and slung it over her shoulder. There were a dozen or more in the hall leading back to the lobby and six or seven on either side. Frays flipped the selector switch all the way around on her M4 and sent bursts in each direction, at least knocking down the creatures advancing on her as the weapon’s bolt locked to the rear. The carbine’s report became almost deafening as the heat of the expended ammunition burned up the steel wool stuffed into the suppressor. She swung the weapon around on its sling and drew her M9 as she started off towards the Humvee. How she made it back towards the lobby Frays would never know: it was all a blur of gunfire, punching, screaming, grasping hands and running.

“Oh, no...” Amy moaned as she stood to one side of the doors that led from the emergency room to the lobby. There were easily three dozen more zombies crowded into the space between the two automatic doors or pounding on the floor to ceiling windows facing the parking lot. She took several deep breaths as she swapped out the empty magazine in her M4 for a full one, jamming the empty into her cargo pocket.

Her hand brushed against the pouch on her LCS where she had stashed the fragmentation grenades taken off the dead soldiers at the checkpoint in Boston.

Frays looked around, mildly amazed that she was still seemed to be unnoticed for the moment and took out one of the grenades. Amy frowned at the little metal baseball in her hand for a second and wished she had more training on using them. Still, she reflected, that she had played enough
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
to probably figure it out. Frays stuck her index finger through the ring on the pin and tugged. It took more effort than she thought it would, but she remembered to hold the spoon down. Amy swallowed nervously and moved her thumb, letting the spoon fly away.

One thousand one, one thousand two
Frays counted in her head then she flung it across the lobby and ducked behind the wall. She thought the grenade was a dud for half a second until the wall shook and a cloud of dusty debris blew through the door next to her with a startlingly loud
KABOOM!
Amy shook her head and blinked a couple times before moving out into the lobby with the butt of her carbine pressed to her shoulder.

The grenade h
ad blown out not only the doors but shattered every piece of glass in the immediate area. Not only were the windows gone but the space where the automatic doors were a few seconds ago looked kind of like someone had set off an M80 under a big pile of rotten hamburger that had been slathered with old maple syrup. Frays made it out of the lobby, her boots crunching on debris, as a couple shredded bodies started dragging themselves over the broken glass after her.

There were about a dozen bodies piled up around the back of the Humvee as she ran from the building towards the truck. “Lacey! Lacey!” she shouted, sprinting to the vehicle. “Lacey are you okay? We gotta get outta here!” She skidded to a halt
almost falling on her butt and nearly wetting her pants when the Marine jammed the muzzle of his M16 in her face as she came within reach of the truck.

Frays
sprinted around the truck, making for the driver’s side door and almost ran right into another zombie as she came around the driver’s side of the Humvee. She somehow managed to get a hold of the creature’s arm and bash it’s skull against the side of the truck, leaving it in a heap on the ground. Amy brought the arch of her foot down as hard as she could on the back of the thing’s neck, dove into the truck and slammed the accelerator to the floor.

The
vehicle responded, its tires squealing, as Amy steered it out of the turnaround and into the parking lot. The vehicle bounded over the flowerbed dividing the exit and entry lanes for traffic coming to or leaving the property. Amy nearly hit her head on the roof of the Humvee, so she could only imagine how little fun it had to be for Lacey and Rodriguez in the back. She hoped that Rodriguez’s stretcher was tied down good and tight…

The truck swerved and almost went out of control as Frays pulled out onto the street. The Humvee roared down the street away from the hospital. There was somebody screaming in the truck. It sounded like there was somebody who was really, really scared in the truck. It took Amy a minute to realize that she was the one screaming.

The Humvee raced down the road, Frays somehow steering it around the forgotten cars left sitting in the road without even thinking about it until she managed to get a hold of herself. There was a Y intersection coming up with a wide open field right in front guarded by a low wooden fence. “Hang on!” she shouted as she pointed the truck’s crash bar right at the fence.