What We Left Behind (18 page)

Steve must have seen David and Jane, but he hasn’t said anything. He must know they don’t stand a chance. He’s focused, keeping me on task. There will be time to mourn later.

“This had better work,” I say, and for the first time I doubt my father.

Steve opens the door to the hospital and everything changes. Our plans are ruined by one unforeseen circumstance: darkness.

The door swings shut behind us. There’s barely any light in the reception area. The blinds have been drawn and what little light there is slips in through the cracks, tormenting us with nothing but a vague outline of the room.

There’s a waist-high reception desk at the far end of the room, partially obscuring a darkened doorway. A row of chairs lines one wall. The floor is sticky under our boots. A soft squelch marks each step.

“Shit!”

I’m pretty sure Steve and I both spoke at the same time.

A zombie growls in the shadows.

I’ve got my gun out, pointing in the direction of the sound, but a shot fired in here is a really bad idea. Whatever zombies are in the building will come flying through that darkened doorway at us and we don’t stand a chance of making a single head shot, let alone dozens. I can barely see my gun outstretched in front of me and have no idea what I’m aiming at. My hand shakes.

“Five minutes, Haze,” Steve whispers. “If we’re going to do this, we have to move.”

I’m about to ask,
are you crazy?
But this is my crazy, stupid idea. Every instinct I have says to back quietly out the door and run like hell, but he’s right. We’ve come all this way. If my father is correct, the answers we need are in this building.

I put my gun away. As much as I want to cling to it for security, it’s useless in the dark. I switch the baseball bat to my right hand and raise trusty old Nathan up over my shoulder, ready to bash anything that comes flying at me.

My foot catches on something lying on the floor and I stumble. I don’t want to know what it is. I’m just glad it doesn’t move. I’m overwhelmed by a sudden fear of another bony hand grabbing at my ankle. I can almost feel those dead fingers clinging to my leg again. Carefully, cautiously, I step over whatever is lying there.

Steve creeps forward, his footsteps betrayed by the sticky floor. Steve is left-handed. He’s a southpaw. I should have noticed before now, but up until this moment it hasn’t held any significance. Now, though, being left-handed means we can push our shoulders against each other as we creep through the room, ready to strike at the shadows. We’re the mirror image of each other, covering different sides of the room.

Zee snarls.

“In the doorway,” Steve whispers.

I can’t see anything. My mind plays tricks on me, and I’m sure someone is creeping up behind us. I want to turn and look behind me, but I keep my eyes forward, desperately trying to make out any movement in the grainy darkness.

A dark arm reaches across the counter as Zee climbs up onto the reception desk. I feel the muscles in Steve’s back and shoulder flex as he swings, and that’s my cue. I swing on instinct, putting everything I can into my strike. I can’t see anything other than the black outline of the door and dark fingers on the counter. I’m trusting Steve. Both our bats collide with something. Steve strikes slightly higher. I think I hit a jaw, as I see the black outline of a head skew to one side as Steve’s steel pipe glances up off a crushed skull.

Blood splatters across the countertop.

Zee falls, slumping from the counter onto the floor. I can’t help but think that it was too easy. Normally, we have to beat these monsters to death.

I reach for the blinds, opening them and allowing daylight to flood the room.

The body lying in front of us is emaciated, looking more like a starving child than a zombie. The skin is yellow, stretched tight over a bony frame.

I’m shocked to see four or five other zombies huddled in the corner. They mumble with the influx of light, but they’re staring at each other. They look confused. It seems they don’t notice us or don’t recognize us as food. I’m not sure how long that will last and don’t want to wait to find out. Like the zombie that attacked us, they’re little more than skin and bones. Their muscles have atrophied, wasting away.

Several zombie corpses lie scattered on the ground, only they’re not injured in any visible way. They’ve collapsed and died where they’ve fallen.

Steve takes my hand and pulls me on. Neither of us take our eyes off the zombies stirring in the corner. It’s as though they’re drowsy, like they’re waking from slumber.

We creep around the desk, stepping over untouched corpses, hoping they’re not alive. One of them stirs. A hand reaches for my leg. I bat it away softly, more pushing than hitting it, and the hand collapses, exhausted.

Steve leads me through the darkened doorway and down a narrow corridor. There are offices on either side, and it’s then I realize the hopelessness of our situation. I barely have any idea what I’m looking for. I’m hoping to find something that can be identified as an anti-parasitic tablet, but in the darkness I’d never know where they were kept. There was a collapsed stand in the lobby. Leaflets and packages lay strewn on the floor. We could have walked right past several packets of worming tablets and not even known it.

The corridor ends, opening out into a large room. It’s pitch black in here and my heart is pounding in my chest. I’m expecting to be attacked at any second. The thought of being eaten alive in the darkness, unable to defend or even see my attacker terrifies me. A thin crack around the far door provides the only light.

I bump into a steel cage, knocking it from a bench onto the ground. The cage crashes to the floor and zombies stir in the dark. I can hear them bumping into things, moaning softly, snarling as we walk past.

“Shhh,” Steve whispers, and I want to scream at him to hurry up. I know I’m supposed to be quiet. I don’t need him to tell me that. I’m not trying to make noise. I can’t see anything. I’m shaking with fear.

Steve leads me on further into the darkness.

I let go of his hand. I have to. It’s impossible to trust solely in him, knowing he can’t see anything either. I need some other point of reference. Touch is the only sense I have, that and the soft sound of our boots on the linoleum. I’m reminded of David’s warning:
we rely on sight; they rely on scent
. There’s a deep growl from somewhere behind me. They know we’re here. We’ve got to get out of here. I push on Steve’s back, but he won’t go any faster.

“I think this is some kind of holding room,” Steve whispers.

“Just move,” I reply, and I realize he’s as afraid as I am. He’s trying to move as fast as he can, but he too desperately wants to avoid stumbling into Zee in the darkness. There could be a zombie just inches away from me and I wouldn’t know it until he bit.

The stench is overwhelming. I’m on the verge of throwing up.

I run my fingers along the bars of a series of floor-to-ceiling cages, giving myself a sense of direction.

Steve stops.

I sense rather than see him come to a halt in the darkness. Light bleeds into the room from around the door frame.

Steve opens the door and sunlight streams in, blinding me for a moment. I turn and there are dozens of zombies in the cages lining the walls. Someone trapped them in here. They’re all dead, but not from gunshot wounds. Most of them are little more than skeletons, having rotted away.

Feet pound on the floor behind us. Someone’s running after us, racing out of the darkness.

We hurry through the door. A pale zombie emerges from the shadows with its arms outstretched, only he looks like a drowning man reaching for a rope. Steve slams the steel fire door behind us, sealing Zee in the darkness.

Zee pounds feebly on the metal door, almost begging to be let out.

We’re in a warehouse at the back of the hospital. Sunlight comes in through the high windows. Large rolling doors open out onto an industrial loading dock that must have served several other business in the adjacent buildings.

A zombie walks past as casually as a worker might when heading out for a break. With pale skin and sickly green hair, he could be a punk rocker punching a time clock in a factory before heading out to play in a band on the weekend. If only that were the case. Either Zee doesn’t see us, or he doesn’t realize we haven’t turned.

As he walks away, I can see he’s lost his right arm just below the elbow. It’s a common injury, suggesting he was protecting his face and neck when he was attacked as a human. His loss is a stark reminder that these monsters were all once like us. That’s the madness of the apocalypse—the innocent become murderers. I can only hope I won’t end up like him.

“Jackpot,” Steve says, pointing at the aisles full of dusty boxes. The animal hospital was well stocked before the outbreak and hasn’t been looted. I guess pet shampoo and cat collars weren’t high priority items in the early days.

A shadow passes over the window above us. The warehouse is recessed into the side of the hill we just came down. Although we’re twenty feet below the windows, the angle of the hill means Zee is almost level with the windows outside. There’s an office at the rear of the warehouse, forming a mezzanine level.

“They’re looking for us.”

“We’re out of time, Haze,” Steve says. “One quick sweep of the floor and we’re out of here.”

“Okay.”

There’s no argument from me. I know he’s right. Five minutes was only ever a guide. Just one minute down here by the mall is a minute too long. We need to find those worm tablets and get the hell out of Dodge.

Steve jogs down the first aisle, scanning the boxes on the various shelves—flea powder, grooming brushes, aquarium filters, chew toys, kitty litter. I follow close behind, but I can’t see any pattern. There’s nothing to suggest what we’ll find on the next shelf.

Steve dusts off a box, opens it, and peers inside. There are hundreds of empty, chewed plastic packets. He pulls one out. The label reads “dried pig’s ear.” There’s a hole in the side of the box.

“Rats,” I say.

“Yeah.”

We move on to the next aisle.

I walk around the corner, more interested in what’s on the shelves than in keeping watch for Zee. There’s a woman, and at first I barely notice her. I’m too focused on our search. Her back is to me. She sniffs at the air, leaning her head back and peering at the ceiling.

Steve grabs me by the shoulder, yanking me back out of sight. I feel stupid. I should have been more careful, but it’s difficult to stay constantly on alert. There’s a limit to the endurance of my concentration. I want downtime. I need to relax, but I can’t, not yet, and I feel dumb having almost walked into a zombie.

Quietly, we creep back into the first aisle, only to be confronted by a group of five zombies staring us down. They crouch with arms outstretched, blocking our way. Snarling, they charge. I turn to run, but the woman from the other aisle is standing behind us. She’s staring at me, salivating. She’s wearing cargo pants like mine and a loose-fitting T-shirt. She’s my doppelgänger. If it weren’t for the dried blood on the side of her head where her ear has been torn off, she could be a survivor, but she’s not. Seeing someone so fresh, someone so similar to me, is more chilling than any of the old creepy zombies, and I’m confronted by my own nightmares. She cocks her head sideways, opening her mouth and revealing dark stained teeth.

Bones crunch behind me. There’s screaming and yelling from the zombies. Steve swings his metal pipe, striking at the lead zombie but there are too many of them. They overwhelm him, pushing him back into the shelving. Steve kicks out with his legs, knocking two of them over.

The woman lunges at me, ready to tear me apart. I swing my bat, catching her on the jaw and knocking her into a box of dog toys. Brightly colored plastic balls and Frisbees scatter across the floor.

Another zombie grabs me from behind. With fingers like nails, Zee grabs my shoulder, pulling on the leather canteen strap and jerking me to one side. I twist, struggling to pull away as a steel pipe crashes over the zombie’s head, knocking her to the concrete.

Steve switches rapidly between zombies, targeting all of them instead of finishing any one of them off. He swings again, catching another zombie in the stomach and causing her to keel over. I kill the zombie that grabbed me, bringing my baseball bat down hard and splitting his head open like a grapefruit.

There’s a zombie in a business suit, torn and tattered. He moves with surprising speed, knocking me over, and I fall on the first woman lying in the aisle. I lose my grip on the baseball bat and it clatters across the floor, rolling just out of reach. The female zombie isn’t dead, just stunned. Steve fights with the man while the woman claws at my arm, tearing my shirt.

“No!” I scream. “Get off me!”

She is amazingly strong, pinning me down as she lunges at my neck. I raise my arm, sacrificing my greave, and she takes the bait. Her teeth sink into the leather strapping and I can feel the pressure of her bite as she twists and tears with her head, ripping the greave away and chewing on it. I grab my baseball bat and bunt at her jaw, knocking her to one side and buying myself a fraction of a second to scramble away.

She spits the greave on the ground and dives at me. I’m on my knees, but I’ve got a good grip on the bat. I swing and catch her squarely on the temple, crushing the side of her head. She falls, but she refuses to give up. Her hands grab at my legs as I get to my feet. With one final blow, I hit her across the back of the neck and she slumps to the concrete, dead.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a dark shadow creeping between the shelving, knocking boxes into the aisle. I swing with an uppercut, catching Zee beneath the chin and pinning his head on a hook set into the shelf frame. He hangs there twitching as blood drips from the back of his neck.

Beside me, Steve brings his pipe down over the shoulder of the businessman. Bones snap and break. With another swing, he connects with the zombie’s forehead and Zee reels backwards, collapsing to the bloodstained floor.