Surviving Beyond the Zombie Apocalypse (26 page)

     “No,” I cried softly and reached out to push his eyelids down. “I’m sorry.”

     As soon as I brushed Taylor’s eyes closed, they shot back open, tickling my hand with his eyelashes.

     “Christina, we gotta get going,” Taylor wheezed, struggling to get up from the toilet.

     “Taylor, don’t move,” I commanded. “Let me look at your throat.”

     His face turned slowly in my direction as if seeing me for the first time.

      “Christina, we gotta get going,” the young man repeated with frustration.

     I wondered what had become of the little girl, and, at that moment, Taylor lunged toward me. I took a step backward and managed to avoid his grasp but slipped in the blood covering the floor. I landed flat on my back, knocking the wind out of me. My head stuck out of the stall, but my body remained inside. I gasped for air as I turned to the right to see Christina huddled as if hiding in the corner under a sink.

     Before I could catch my breath and call to her, Taylor jumped on top of me. I held him away from me, and the blood from his neck dripped down on me.

     I looked up into the dead eyes and said, “Taylor, there’s got to be something of you left inside.”

     I felt or thought I felt his arms loosen a little. “You do remember me, don’t you?”

     I pushed with all the strength left in me, and Taylor rolled off of me and lie still. Jumping to my feet, I grabbed the gun from my belt. I looked at the motionless body on the floor.

     “Taylor, are you still in there?”

     No response.

     I aimed the gun at him. Actually, it could not be him, I told myself. I would never shoot Taylor, but this imposter did not belong. My hands began shaking as I pointed at the shape on the floor. I stayed like that for a long time. “This is not Taylor,” my brain repeated, but my fingers would not listen and squeeze the trigger.

     I lowered the gun, trying to gather my strength at the same time the shell of Taylor rolled over and grabbed my ankle. I howled from pain as the fingernails dug into my skin. I fired the pistol down into the top of the shell’s head, which exploded like a melon, spraying blood and bone and brain all over the stall and me.

     “Goddammit!” I screamed. I might have screamed more if Christina had not grabbed my arm before I could. 

     “I don’t feel so good,” she said quietly.

     I glanced at her and with my free hand pulled the stall door closed. The last thing she needed to see was something that looked like Taylor sprayed all over the place.

     I turned toward her and took my hand which still held the gun away from her. I spread my arms to lift her up.

     “I don’t feel so good,” Christina repeated, and I winced as her small teeth sunk into my shoulder.

     I don’t remember any pain at all as I threw her off of me. The shell of Christina hit the floor with a sickening thud and was still. An instant later, the small shell scrambled across the floor toward me. I raised the gun and said, “I’m sorry.”

     The shot hit the shell in the right cheek and tore away its face. The impact threw it backwards like a rag doll into the wall. The form remained bent and still, but I stared at it for a long time. 

     Finally, I turned and walked out of the bathroom. The terminal had become completely deserted. I trudged toward the boarding gate. Now, the pain in my shoulder became intense. I reached over to touch it gingerly and pulled back a hand covered in blood. I felt dizzy at the sight of it, but I kept moving toward the gate. The gun hung limply in my right hand, though I was no longer aware of it. The only thing I focused upon was the boarding gate.

     I got about fifty feet from the glass door leading from the terminal down a corridor to the boarding ramp and spotted Kat. She was standing just inside, having what appeared to be an animated conversation with General Thompson.

     I smiled at the sight of her energy and determination. I loved her; that was a certainty.

     She must have caught my movement out of the corner of her eye, because Kat immediately turned toward me and then grabbed the general to show him I was standing outside the door.

     I mouthed the words I love you. Kat smiled and repeated the words to me.

     The last thing I saw was her smile fade as I lifted the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger.

I hope you enjoyed
The Most Uncommon V: Surviving Beyond the Zombie Apocalypse
.

Please take a sneak peak at my latest work
Near Death
due out at the end of 2015.

     From his position in bed, Mike could just see the corner of the nurse’s station in the hallway. On other nights, he had heard the nurses talking or working on computers or answering phones. Now he heard no sound from the area. In fact, he heard no sound from anywhere. Even the machines which were constantly beeping or humming seemed to have gone quiet. Under ordinary circumstance and in an ordinary state of mind, he would have stopped to consider these odd facts. However, these were nowhere near ordinary circumstances, and Mike was a long way from an ordinary state of mind.

     He slid slowly off the bed, all the while expecting someone to rush into the room to stop him. As his feet touched the floor, he paused as if waiting for a hand to touch him. Nothing touched him, and he continued his unsteady movement from the bed. Since waking to find himself in the hospital, Mike had not been allowed to venture alone from the bed. Now, to his surprise, he was taking unfettered, unsupervised steps. The notion of breaking the rules brought a grin to his face.

     When he reached the doorway, Mike could not resist turning to take a look back at his room. It was as if somehow he knew that this was the last chance he would have to see the room. Or maybe he was just curious to see the room from this new angle. In any case, the teacher turned back around and walked into the brightly-lit hallway.

     He squinted at the bright light which seemed to give everything a painfully intense glow. Through the haze of light, Mike searched for any signs of the hospital staff but saw no one. The thought of seeing Doctor Dixon gave him a comforting sensation, and he immediately decided that this was the goal of his quest. He looked down the long, empty corridor to the right and then to the left. He wondered at the absolute emptiness of the place before catching sight of some movement down the hall to his right.

     A dark wooden door had slowly opened, and Mike heard the creak of its worn hinges.

     Without thinking about it, he began trotting toward the door. However, he soon discovered the limitations of his body made his trotting more like shuffling. He felt slight frustration at being unable to move quickly but made it to the door soon enough.

     The door had opened into some sort of small office, which was now flooded with darkness. In fact, the bright light from the hospital corridor seemed unable or unwilling to pierce the deep darkness waiting beyond the doorway.

     Mike stood in what seemed like the relative safety of the light as he peered into the thick black of the office. Whether real or imagined, there seemed to be movement within the dark. No sound escaped the inky blackness.

     Despite the strangeness of the situation, Mike did his best to remain grounded in the logical world.

Unsure what else to do, he timidly called, “Doctor Dixon, uh, doctor, it’s Mike Gallagher.”

     He waited anxiously at the door for some response as he tried to make out the shapes moving within the darkness. The teacher strained his eyes but somehow the shapes remained just out of his clear vision. He crept closer to the doorway and the line dividing light from dark. Mike’s body tensed at every muscle as he moved just beyond the light.

“Doctor, are you in here?”

     Instantly, Mike felt as though all of the air had been sucked out of the room, leaving everything absolutely still. In the next moment, the place exploded with a force that blew Mike backward into the wall across the hallway.

     He slid to the floor and lie there stunned for a few seconds. The next thing he saw was a woman’s face staring down at him. The long brown hair hung down toward Mike, forming a sort of tunnel to her face. He looked up at the face and thought that it looked familiar although he could not remember why. The face hovering above him in that hair tunnel appeared to be a long distance away and the neutral expression upon it gave no clue as to the reason for its presence.

     “I was just looking for Doctor Dixon,” Mike stammered.

     The words captured the gaze of the eyes on the face although the expression did not change and showed no signs of understanding Mike’s statement.

     The expression finally changed to a half smile and an instant later the face was close enough for Mike to smell something like spoiled meat on the woman’s breath.

     “The doctor is out,” she whispered before biting into the teacher’s nose and cheek.

     Mike felt the warm blood streaming down his face and tried to reach up to wipe it away. Something was preventing his hands from moving, and he looked to find out what that was. The sight of the canvass cuffs tethering his hands to the bed railing knocked him back and out of the hallway back to his room.

     He pulled his arms, trying to break out of the cuffs. The shock of finding himself restrained once again sent fury racing through his body. The image of the face hovering at the end of the tunnel sent a wave of fear to join the fury he was experiencing. 

Mike’s efforts to escape his bondage grew more intense, and he began screaming. The railings shook but did not release him. 

     He was thrashing from side to side when the first nurse rushed into the room. “Mr. Gallagher, you just need to calm down! Please, you’re going to injure yourself.” The nurse leaned over to hold Mike’s arm. In the next moment, she was knocked back from the bed with a bruised lip. The big black orderly that had been in the room previously quickly pinned Mike down.

     “Okay, let’s get this blood cleaned up,” the nurse said, lifting herself off the floor.  A pair of nurses who had been standing in the doorway watching moved next to the bed and wiped the blood off of Mike’s face.

     The nurse who had been knocked back from the bed came to the railing and looked down at him. Mike saw her name tag read “Nurse Tiller” followed by a series of letter that meant nothing to him. He expected her to be angry at him for having knocked her back against the wall, but the solid-looking woman simply looked at him and shook her head.  “Mister Gallagher, I sure didn’t figure you for somebody who’d give me a hard time.”

     “I am really sorry,” Mike started to apologize, but Tiller cut him off.

     “Mister Gallagher, I have been a nurse here at Sac Memorial for nearly thirty years now. I don’t need apologies from patients.  All I ask is that you do as directed by me and my nursing staff.”

     As would be the case with any English teacher, Mike had trouble not offering Nurse Tiller a grammar correction. Fortunately, he controlled the impulse and instead said, “I will certainly do that.”

     Tiller responded with a forced smile and said, “Well then, hon, we should get along just fine.” She picked up a gauze pack from the counter and started to clean Mike’s face. “Now why in the world did you want to go and bloody up your pretty face like this.”

     The image of the woman biting to his face and moving away with the bloody chunk of his nose still between her teeth flashed in front of his eyes. However, it had already taken on the aspect of something seen in a movie or on television rather than something in which he had been involved.

     “What? You think I did all this to myself?” Mike started to protest.

     Nurse Tiller chuckled and then laughed loudly. “Well, since you’re the only body in range and there’s blood on the rail here, I’d have to say yeah. But if you got a good story to tell me, I’d love to hear it.”

     Mike glanced over to see the red smudges on the shiny silver rail and said nothing. He slowly lowered his head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes.

     The sounds of the hospital hummed in his ears for a few seconds until every bit of attention was grabbed by the face moving down from the ceiling.

His mouth opened as if ready to scream, but what erupted from him was not a shriek. Mike began laughing. The sound began as soft giggles and grew into an explosion of guffaws. The reaction seemed to surprise Mike himself, but he was unable to keep the tremors from rolling through his body. The laughter grew until sounded hysterical. Through it all, he stared up into the face floating down from above.  All at once, he recognized the woman. 

     “Mike, you need to wake up,” she said.

     The words sent him into another fit of laughter that shook his entire body. Whether it was from simply the laughing seizure or the terror of the approaching woman, he felt rattled to the core. Still, he was not able to stop laughing. He gasped for breath but could not find it.