Season of Rot (2 page)

Some of the other refugees still believed
help was coming, but Jack suffered no such delusions. Any survivors
out there were certainly in the same sort of mess his group was in,
or at least incapable of breaching the armies of the dead to rescue
them. There would be no help coming. It was up to him, to
them
, to find their way out of the city—if there was one.
Any attempt to escape would cost them lives, but Jack was willing
to accept some losses for the greater good as long as some of them
survived to carry on. And as long as his ass wasn’t one that got
chewed off along the way.

***

Clutching a beat-up Daffy Duck doll in his
sweaty palms, Chris made his way down the winding hospital
corridors to the nursery. In a few moments he would see his
daughter for the first time. The doctor, Laura, hadn’t let him stay
during the delivery last night. There had been complications with
the birth beyond his understanding. He’d been forced to wait
outside as Natalie entered the world and his wife Rebecca left
it.

He had watched as Jack and Mitchell carried
her to the roof, her body wrapped in bloodstained sheets bound with
thick ropes. Chris had cried and screamed, had even tried to attack
Mitchell, but Jack calmed him down. “Think of your daughter,” he
had said, as if giving an order. “She
does
need you.” Chris
knew he was right and did his best to hold in the sobs.

He tore the hospital apart after that,
looking for a gift he could take to his new daughter. At last he
found Daffy inside a desk drawer in one of the offices. He sat and
stared at the doll for hours, weeping for Rebecca, himself, and
Natalie. He managed to pull himself together just as Laura found
him and told him he could visit his child whenever he was
ready.

Before he went in, Chris walked around and
gave himself time to prepare, letting his excitement drive away the
horrors of the world. Finally, he was ready. He ran the last few
steps to the nursery proper, and as he rounded the corner he saw
his daughter and stopped dead in his tracks. His breath left his
body as if someone had punched him in the gut.

Beyond the nursery window, a nurse cradled
the newborn, trying to soothe her as she cried and waved her tiny
arms. Chris took a deep breath and stepped into the room. The nurse
smiled and held Natalie out to him just as he held out the doll. He
reddened, embarrassed by the mix up. And then he took his daughter
into his arms, and his heart nearly burst with pride.

***

Jack and Laura waited in the conference room
for Vince to arrive. As usual he was late. Jack gritted his teeth
and, scowling, checked his watch again. Laura hoped Vince would
show up soon; it looked like Jack was on the verge exploding.

She picked up the stack of inventory reports
Jack had brought her, then thumped them down on the table,
straightening the pile of papers.

“Jack,” she started as the door swung open.
Vince came in and plopped into a chair at the table. He hadn’t
shaved in a day or two, and he wore a battered t-shirt, jeans,
mismatched socks, and sneakers that had seen better times. Vince’s
appearance was another sore point with Jack, who believed those in
power should set an example for those they led.

“Good morning, guys,” Vince said cheerfully,
ignoring Jack’s glares. “Sorry I’m late. I had a busy night.”

“So did we,” Jack pointed out. “Rebecca died
in childbirth last night.”

Vince’s cheerful expression crumbled. “God,
I’m sorry. Why didn’t you call me?”

“We did,” Laura said. “You didn’t answer your
radio.”

Vince shifted in his seat. “Oh yeah, I had to
leave it behind. I was doing some work up on the roof.”

“I was on the roof this morning, Vince,” Jack
said. “You weren’t there.”

“No. I turned in around three or so.”

“What were you doing up there, Vince?” Laura
asked, heading off an outburst from Jack.

“Brainstorming.” Vince smiled.

For a second, Laura thought he meant
brainstorming for one of his novels. Although he had worked as
everything from a dishwasher and taxi driver to a bookstore owner
and photojournalist, Vince was primarily a horror writer, with the
mindset and attitude of an artist. If he started talking about his
writing, that would set Jack off like nothing else.

“I think I’ve come up with a way to solve our
supply and escape woes,” Vince added.

Laura relaxed a bit. She really hadn’t felt
up to playing her usual role as levelheaded mediator between Jack
and Vince. Without her intervention she often thought the hospital
would either become a pseudo-military dictatorship or fall apart
completely from neglect.

Jack still seemed dead set on making her job
difficult this morning. “Do tell,” he said sarcastically.

Jack was a hardheaded son of a bitch any way
you looked at him. Before the dead rose and claimed the world he’d
been the foreman of a construction crew contracted to remodel the
hospital. He wasn’t a fool—the man held degrees in engineering and
architecture. He was just too accustomed to being in charge. He’d
grown up in a military family, so structure and discipline were
almost holy to him. It was as if he saw himself as the group’s
commander in chief. And at times he felt his way was the only
way.

“Well, my plan’s pretty simple really,” Vince
said. “The hospital has a helipad right?”

Laura sighed. “Vince, there’s no way we can
get our hands on a helicopter, much less one large enough to move
all of us and the supplies we’d need.”

“That’s it?” Jack asked Vince. “You were up
there most of the night without your damn radio and all you came up
with is the fact that we have a helipad?”

“Whoa, settle down, big guy,” Vince said,
laughing. “We all agreed that we couldn’t reach the airport to get
a helicopter, that’s true, but I was going over the maps of the
city again and did you know the WKT station is only a couple of
miles from here? You can’t see it with the binoculars, but I
borrowed Chris’s telescope. The station’s got a copter sitting on
its roof.”

Laura shook her head. “It’s too small for
what you’re thinking, Vince. At best, it’d hold four people with
minimal gear.”

“Yes, we couldn’t use it to escape as group,
but we...” Vince saw that he had lost their attention. “Just hear
me out, okay?”

Laura motioned for Jack to stay quiet for a
moment.

“We send a small strike team to fetch the
bird, but we don’t use it to escape. Once we have it, we’ll have a
viable means of traveling around the city. Do you know how many
other hospitals and buildings have helipads? A damn lot of them do.
So we use it to reach those buildings, loot their supplies, or even
fly out and land in less populated areas of the city to make ground
raids. Sure, some of us will have to risk our asses to do it, but
it’s a damn sight better than risking the whole group trying to
make it out of here on the ground.

“And here’s the beautiful part: not only
would food no longer be an immediate problem, but some of the
buildings I’m talking about have fuel depots for birds like the one
we’d be using. We’d also have a way to reach the airport and steal
us a larger bird if we really needed to get out of here.”

“It’s risky, Vince,” Laura said. “There are
so many things that could go wrong every time our raiding parties
took the helicopter out, and dozens of ways we could lose the
helicopter after we’ve got it... if we can even get it. One failed
raid and we could be right back where we started with nothing to
show for it except some of us being dead.”

“A
strike
team?” Jack laughed. “Just
who the hell out of our little group fits that description? None of
us have any military training. Hell, half of the folks here have
barely even used a gun more than once or twice in their lives, and
those times were in desperation after the plague hit.”

“Actually, Jack, I thought we’d go. Me, you,
Mitchell, and Chris. And Daniel, of course. He’s the only one who
knows how to fly a bird.”

“You’d take three of our strongest people
and
our only engineer on this fool’s errand? You’d actually
leave Laura here with no one left to head things up if the hospital
had to be defended?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Jack, we all
have ‘basic experience’ or we wouldn’t be alive, would we?”

“Vince,” Laura said, “what you’re suggesting
might work if the creatures outside were like the ones in the
movies, but they’re not. Those things out there move like us.
They’re fast and there are thousands of them. There’s no way a team
could fight its way through them to the station.”

“You’re right, but they could leapfrog to
it,” Vince said with a grin.

“Leapfrog?” Jack muttered under his
breath.

“All we’d have to do is jury-rig some
grappling gear. We could hop from one rooftop to another all the
way to the station. How many creatures have you seen on the roofs?
Not many. Only a handful of the things ever wander that high, and
most of them either fall off or leave when they find that the roofs
are empty. Chris used to be a professional mountain climber. With
his help, it’ll be easy.”

“Chris’s wife just died last night,” Laura
reminded Vince coldly. “He has a daughter to think of now. Even if
he wasn’t an emotional wreck, I’m not sure he’d agree to be a part
of your plan.”

“Leapfrog?” Jack repeated, laughing aloud
this time. “Holy shit, you are crazy. This isn’t the fucking Matrix
or something. We’re not superheroes. Going from roof to roof would
be nearly as suicidal as facing the creatures head on.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Vince asked.

“Making a break for it with the damn cars
locked up in the garage seems like a better idea than that,” Jack
said. “And we all know there’s way too many of those things out
there to make it, even if we armored the vehicles and wasted all
our firepower trying.”

“I’m sorry Vince,” Laura said, hoping to cut
Jack short. “Everything you’re suggesting is just too risky. Let’s
drop it and move on, okay?”

Vince shrugged and gave up. He knew if Laura
sided with Jack it was pointless to continue, even if he was right.
That’s one of the things Laura liked about Vince. Though
occasionally temperamental, he was generally laid back and didn’t
care how things got done as long as they did get done.

She turned to Jack. “According to these
reports, we have nearly four weeks of food and water left,
right?”

Jack nodded.

“Then that gives us some time. Maybe we can
come up with some other options.... One other thing from your lists
that concerns me is the lack of weapons and ammo. If it
does
come down to a plan like Vince’s, Jack, can we realistically equip
a team to send out and still have enough firepower here, should
something happen?”

“Honestly, no. Even without splitting the
weapons, if the dead found a way up to us right now we wouldn’t
have enough here to make a real stand... but I don’t think that’s
going to happen, or it would have already.”

“Point taken,” Laura said and leaned back in
her chair.

“So then what the hell do we do?” Vince
asked.

They all sat in silence.

***

Two floors above the informal tribunal
meeting, Daniel had returned to his obsessive work in what he
considered his own field. Though he had actually been a pilot
before the plague, he’d also been a HAM radio fanatic and was the
closest thing the group had to a communications expert. Since his
first days in the hospital he’d been trying to reach other
survivors using the radio equipment he’d found in the building. His
efforts weren’t entirely futile. More than once he’d made contact
with another group or person still alive in the world outside, even
a few in the city itself. But they were always cut off from the
hospital by either the dead or a lack of transport. The other
survivors might as well have been on the moon.

The part that really depressed Daniel was
that he never managed to stay in contact with any of them. They
simply disappeared from the airwaves as if they had never been
there at all. He told himself those poor souls had just ran out of
power to broadcast or that they’d been rescued.

Daniel had boosted his signal as much as he
could. His range was huge for the equipment he had available, but
he still wished for more. He told himself that if he just kept
trying, one day he would reach a group capable of coming to the
hospital’s aid. He’d spent the last few days scanning the civilian
bands, so today he switched back to the military channels.

His only radio contact with a military unit
had been scary as hell. The soldiers demanded his location as if
they intended to raid the hospital rather than come to their
rescue. They hadn’t said that outright, but Daniel could read
voices. They were his passion. Hell, for all he knew they’d already
tried to reach the hospital and had been consumed in the attempt by
the dead. He’d certainly never heard from them again. He never even
told the others about them, and they were the one party he never
tried very hard to reestablish contact with after they went
missing.

Still, he was desperate. He hadn’t reached
anyone in a long time, and he wanted, maybe even needed, to hear
the voice of someone outside of the group. He needed to know they
weren’t the only ones left.

Daniel made some additional adjustments on
his gear, then sent out his usual message. “This is Saint Joseph
Hospital calling anyone who can hear us. Please respond?” Daniel
leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his unkempt blond
hair. He nearly toppled over when the radio crackled with a
reply.

“This is Installation Phoenix. I copy you,
Saint Joseph. It’s good to hear another voice.”

Daniel rocked forward, grabbing the control
console to answer his new friend.