This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down (4 page)

"Oh, shit," Clara
said.

Joan turned around, and saw that
the creatures they had passed in the hallway had pursued them, cutting off any
sort of escape, not that there was any place in the hospital that didn't seem
to have infected milling around in it. If there was such a place, they had no
way of getting to it. There was only one option, the windows, large thick hunks
of glass that went from floor to ceiling. Joan ran to the nearest one and began
bashing on it with the butt of her rifle, she could see the ground below, a
twenty-foot drop, likely onto either hard concrete or some sort of landscaping
that was likely to impale them. She was fine with either option; it was better
than being torn to shreds.

Clara was there next to her,
bashing the window with her fists. Joan could feel them closing in on her.
Their moans and groans grew in intensity. She wondered if they could still
salivate. She felt the first outstretched hand grasp at the back of her shirt,
pulling her towards it. She spun around to deliver a blow with her rifle, when
the creature's head exploded, blood, bone, and brains spraying out the side of
the infected's head. It fell to the ground, and more took its place.

More gunshots followed, their sound
echoing off the cold walls of the hospital. There was no time to look and see
where the gunshots were coming from. The mass was too thick. Clara and Joan
still had to fight. As soon as one infected's head exploded in pink mist,
another would step up over its body, hands outstretched. The best they could do
was shove and push them back, shuffling along the wall of windows towards where
the shots were coming from.

It seemed like the shooting and
the shoving went on for hours. Clara's arms felt like spaghetti noodles that
had been boiled for ten minutes. There wasn't much strength in them, and she
could see Joan failing out of the corner of her eye, wedging her rifle between
herself and the infected in front of her, leaning back, just out of arm's
reach, like a bully tormenting a smaller child on a playground.

"It's clear! Run this
way!" yelled a voice.

Clara risked a look. The way was
mostly clear. At the end of the waiting room area, she saw people in green and
brown camouflage. Some on their knees, others standing behind them, rifles
aimed and firing. They stuck to the wall as they advanced, their ears ringing with
gunfire. It was going to happen; they were going to escape. Tears came to
Clara's eyes.

"Not that close," a
tall man wearing sunglasses yelled, a five o'clock shadow blanketing his jaw.
They stopped against the wall. The man looked at them, his mood a mystery due
to the sunglasses. "Strip."

The command was simple. The
ability to fulfill it even simpler still, but they hesitated. Where were they?
In what world was it ok for a man to tell them to strip? To take off their
clothes and expose themselves? This was not normal. All of these thoughts ran
through Clara's head, but all she managed to say was, "What?"

The man looked at her, shouting
above the gunfire, "Strip or you ain't coming with us. We've already lost
too many men to people that have looked fine, only to have some hidden wound.
So take your clothes off, or take your chances with them."

Clara looked over her shoulder,
seeing Joan's worried face and behind her, the still moving stream of infected
that were pouring out of the hospital's cafeteria. Clara also knew there were
more below. If her best chance of getting out alive was to take her clothes
off, then fuck it, off they came. She pulled her shirt over her head, and
dropped it onto the floor. She bent over to undo the Velcro straps on her walking
boot, and then she slipped that off as well. As she did, she noticed that Joan
was just standing there.

"Do what they say, Joan.
It's our only way out of here." Joan still hesitated. Then she lowered her
voice to a whisper, "For all we know they'll be dead soon, and it won't
matter if they've seen you naked."

Joan began to disrobe, quickly,
with a minimal amount of sexiness. When they were both standing there, fully
naked, the soldier spoke up again, "Spin."

They twirled about letting the
soldier eyeball them, while the other soldiers continued firing. Clara wondered
how their nightmare could get any worse.

"Alright, put your clothes
back on. Is there anyone else alive in this hospital?"

Clara pulled her jeans on,
balancing on her one good ankle. "Not that we've seen."

Joan spoke up, as she pulled her
clothes on at a lightning pace. "But we haven't been everywhere. There
could still be some trapped in the rest of the hospital."

The firing had stopped. Behind
Joan and Clara was a sight that neither hoped to ever see again. The floor was
littered with the dead. Some were patients, some were hospital staff, there
were even a few policemen in the pile.

Behind the soldiers, the door to
the stairwell burst open, and a stream of the dead poured through it, cutting
off their escape and startling the soldiers at the same time.

"Move!" the soldier in
the sunglasses yelled. "Martinez, get us out of here."

A tan soldier ran down the path
through the middle of the waiting rooms, hopping over bodies, and put his
assault rifle to his eye. He fired three shots at the thick glass windows,
shattering them. The other soldiers fired into the mass, backing up in an
orderly manner. Still the dead swarmed.

Martinez pulled a rope from his
backpack and looked for a place to tie it off. "There's nothing to tie it
to, sir!"

The soldier in the sunglasses
looked at Martinez, and with ice in his voice, he said, "Then tie it
around yourself."

Martinez looked at the mass of
dead headed their way. He knew how much ammo he had, and he knew that the
others must be in the same boat. They were running low, this could be the end
of him, but he did his duty. He tied the rope around his waist, and braced
himself against the lip of the wall. It was only about two inches tall, but it
was enough to give Martinez something to brace against.

One of the soldiers was the
first one down. He hopped on the rope, and slid from view, Martinez' black
combat boots braced against the wall, the tendons in his neck tight and bulging
from supporting the soldier's weight.

"You two are next,"
the man with the glasses said.

Joan let Clara go first. She
grabbed the rope in her hands and backed out into the air. Her arms were
already tired from shoving away the infected, and climbing down the rope put
even more strain on them. She was halfway down when her strength gave out. She
slid uncontrolled for the last ten feet of the descent, the rope shredding the
skin of her hands with heat and friction. She screamed in pain as she thumped
onto the ground, her ankle taking the brunt of the fall. "Clear!" a
soldier yelled while he helped her up off the ground. She limped to the side,
her hands balled into fists and stinging.

She looked around her to see
that they were not alone. Though the mass of infected were not nearly as
concentrated as in the hospital, their presence was still felt. Even now, they
homed in on their position. Joan was the next one down. She had no problem
lowering herself down the rope, and Clara envied her with her unsprained ankle
and her hands that still had all of their flesh. Two more soldiers slid down
the rope, their gloves preventing them from sustaining the same injuries as
Clara.

Clara looked up to see Martinez
standing at the window, shadows converging on him from the darkness inside the
building. He fell to his chest and swiveled his legs into the air, before
shoving his whole body out the window. He hung by his hands, and then he
dropped to the ground, smashing into the concrete, the rope still tied about
his waist. He screamed in pain as he hit, and the other soldiers snatched him
up off the ground and headed straight to a green military vehicle. It was tall,
and Clara needed a boost to get into the back of the massive vehicle. She felt
the soldiers shoving at her hindquarters as they lifted her up. She was too
tired to feel anything but relief for the hands on her backside. She collapsed
on one of the metal benches. The soldiers worked together to lift Martinez into
the back of the truck, and the soldier in the sunglasses was the last one in.

He sat at the edge of the truck,
and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He offered one to the
groaning Martinez, who had blood pooling on the leg of his trousers. Martinez
took one from the package with a shaky hand, and the man with the sunglasses lit
it for him with a plain, stainless steel Zippo. He pulled one out of the pack
for himself.

"Can I have one of
those?" Clara asked.

"Me too," added Joan.

As they drove away smoking,
Clara caught sight of the window they had escaped from. The dead poured out of
it onto the concrete below, rising to follow after the truck. Clara took a deep
breath from the cigarette.
Menthols... it figures
, she thought.

"Wake up, motherfucker!
Time to go to school!" It was his father's voice, yelling at him, the
slurred voice sounding almost playful.

"Get the fuck up!" The
voice changed, the way only an alcoholic's voice can. He just wanted to sleep.
He just wanted to close his ears, his eyes, and his mind and let him go away.
But that's not how alcoholics work. Even if he gave him what he wanted, he
would probably be offended by that.

He sat up, his head filled with
cotton, and he opened his eyes to find that his father was not there. Instead,
sitting across from him was the man he had met the previous night, the man that
had gunned down three of the monsters and prevented Mort from overdosing on
Ambien. The nightmare of the previous day caught up to him, through his foggy
mind, and he closed his eyes.

"Don't do that, man,"
his savior said. "Don't go back to sleep. Plenty of time to sleep when
you're dead, and that'll be soon enough if we don't move our asses out of
here."

Shushing the call of oblivion,
Mort opened his eyes back up. He was lying on a respectable couch, newish, but
not so new that Mort felt bad for sleeping on it with his homeless dirt and
dust. He ran his brown hands over the velvety brown couch, sharp angles,
cushions without holes; it was probably the best bed that Mort had slept on in
a year or two. He sat up, and tried to rise from the couch, but he fell back,
gasping in pain. His knee was swollen, and as the fog of the pills wore off, he
held his leg out straight in front of himself and pulled up the leg of his jeans.
His left knee was monstrous-looking, twice the size of what it usually was. The
cop had really done a number on it. The cuts and scrapes on his body were
nothing compared to the heat and pain radiating from the swollen hunk of flesh
that was supposed to be his knee. It looked like the knee of an elephant.

The man across from him saw the
shape his knee was in, and he got up out of his chair. He returned with an ice
pack in a towel, and handed it to Mort. "This ought to help," he said
in a twangy voice. It reminded Mort of Texas. He had spent some time down there
decades ago. It was a brutal experience, living free, alternating between
blistering heat and downpours of rain that soaked everything to the bone.

"Thank you," he said.

"You might wanna save that
thanks for later, when we actually get out of here."

"What do you mean?"

The man looked at him. He had
hollows around his eyes. They were deep-set, but a vivid  twinkling blue that
Mort could only describe as sniper's eyes. They seemed to see right through
him. His square, narrow jaw was covered in stubble, and he moved easily, his
cowboy boots seeming to be an extension of his feet rather than clunky things
that were meant only for a straw-covered floor at a barn party. The big, brass
belt buckle spoke of American glory, the eagle's claws clutching a bundle of
arrows. "How much do you know?" the man asked him.

"I don't know much about
nothing," Mort told him. "I'm not sure that I haven't lost my mind at
the moment."

The cowboy squatted across from
him, and stared him in the eyes, those sniper's eyes locking him in. "The
world is fucked. We've got to get out of this place. That shit you saw last
night? That shit that you can't believe? That was just the beginning. This
thing is everywhere."

"Everywhere?" Mort
said, barely able to believe what he was hearing.

The cowboy stood up and grabbed
a paper cup off of the ancient wooden coffee table. He spit a wad of tar-filled
spit into the cup, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said,
"They called in the military. They've declared martial law."

Mort felt a sudden rush of
relief. "Well, then that's it. We just sit tight and wait. It will all be
taken care of."

The cowboy smiled at him, white
teeth with sharp canines that were yellowing near the gum line. "You'd
think so, right? You'd think that America would be able to handle its shit, but
think about it this way. There are around 1.5 million troops in the American
armed forces. At any one time, 20% of them are overseas. That leaves 1.2 
million soldiers to clean up this mess. Now, on the news, they're claiming that
this epidemic, this whatever it is, is happening all over the world. That means
that every city in America is going through what we went through last night. It
don't matter how big the city is, people are dying and getting back up. Now, if
1.2 million troops seems like a small number to protect the entire country of
America, then you'd be right. Even if they just protected the top fifty most
populous cities, that means they're sending out 24,000 troops to each one of
those cities... and there are hundreds and thousands of other cities and towns
that aren't receiving any help. Let's say those top fifty cities are saved...
then you're talking about at most one-fourth of the country's population. That
means that potentially there could be two-hundred and fifty million of those
things out there. Think about New York. You're sending 24,000 troops to
safeguard a city of eight million... you think they can pull it off? It's a
numbers game, man, and we don't have 'em."

Mort leaned back on the couch.
Trying to make sense of all the data the man had spewed at him. He understood
the gist, although the numbers were staggering and had stopped making sense to
him soon after the man had spoke. "Well, none of that matters, does it?
We're not in one of those cities that isn't getting help. We're in
Portland."

"Yeah, well. Within a fifty
mile radius of this place, there's three million people. Three million people
who have the potential to turn into one of those things out there. For everyone
one of us that dies, one of them is born. You think 24,000 troops are going to
put a dent in that?"

Mort didn't like what he was
hearing. What kind of world was he living in when you couldn't rely on the
police or the military to protect you? Well, he was used to the police not
protecting him, but the military?

The man with the sniper's eyes
stalked over to the window to look outside, his boots clunking on the wooden
floor. "On top of that, how many people do you think chose to report for
duty when this all happened? Would you abandon your family with this shit going
on? This place is a trap," he said. "Things will get better, for a
time, and then it's going to get worse, and after that... it's going to get
even worse, and after that, it's going to get about as bad as it can get."

"What do you mean?"

The man swung his piercing blue
eyes in his direction. "Think about it. What do you do when you're in a
hopeless situation?"

Mort shrugged his shoulders. The
cowboy looked at him, and then seeing that Mort wasn't going to give him an
answer, he said, "C'mon, man. When they see that it's hopeless, they're
going to bring out the big guns."

Mort thought about all of the
hopeless situations he had been trapped in last night, escaping from a cop car,
using his head to bash his way out, escaping a group of the dead on a shopping
cart, and finally winding up trapped in a bathroom with no way out except for
the arms of the dead. He had been in the process of overdosing on sleeping
pills when the cowboy had showed up... bringing out the big guns. He was going
to kill himself rather than turn into one of those things. "They're going
to bomb the place," he said. "Kill everyone before they can turn into
more of those things."

"Bingo," the cowboy
said.

"Jesus, we've got to get
out of here," Mort said, his voice rising in panic. Mort stood on his leg.

"Not so fast, my hobbled
friend," the cowboy said. "We've got to form a plan first."

"Wait, wait, wait. Before
we start planning here, I need to know something."

The cowboy looked at him and
said, "What?"

"What's your name?"

The cowboy smiled his
white-toothed smile and held out his hand, "My name is Blake. Pleased to
meet you."

Mort shook his hand. Blake had a
strong grip, vice-like. "My name is Mort. Thanks for helping me out last
night. So what sort of plan did you have in mind?"

"Step one... we need
weapons."