I remember the lessons of my senior year biology seminar often nowadays. I wonder where Professor Schneiderman is now, if he’s still alive, still explaining virus behavior to a bunch of starving survivors. Probably not; most likely he’s dead and feeding on those starving survivors. I load my make-shift crossbow, take aim, and shoot–another undead falls and three push to take its place.

When the plague started spreading I was just starting my internship at St. John’s Hospital. I was one year from completing my Bachelor of Sciences with honors. I had a girlfriend, an apartment, and a closet full of jeans and hoodies. Now, I own a deserted hospital, about 50 miles of parking lot, and a few thousand undead who want to rip me to pieces. In terms of sheer quantity, I guess you could call it an upgrade.

Sitting on the roof of the abandoned St. John’s hospital, like every other character in a Zombie flick, I take aim again and another undead falls. If I keep this up I could kill them all in about three years. I grin and finish another Coke stolen from the broken vending machines. I’ll use it later for an improvised Molotov. In the meantime I aim and shot again. After all I got nothing better to do.

The first time I heard about the plague, I was in Professor Schneiderman’s class. Someone had asked him about the recent outbursts of unknown viruses in Africa or Europe. I wasn’t paying attention. I only remember the whole incident because Schneiderman seemed confused. He said it might be a new strand of the Marburg virus or maybe some sort of malaria. Someone noted that the two are completely different, and I asked what this plague was anyway. I hadn’t heard anything about it. Schneiderman started explaining and blamed the media for exaggerating what was probably a very local outburst. Classes were canceled a week after that because of undead janitors wandering through the science building.

I get out of my sunburnt recliner and pee over the ledge. The zombies stare blankly up and a few jump trying to reach me, three stories above. I laugh, and it sounds more like a cackle than the charming laugh my girlfriend loved. That scares me more than the hordes of undead under me. Once the plague started more people died because of stress, panic, and sheer madness then zombie bites.

The doors to the hospital are well-barricaded and I check them regularly, reinforcing them here and there. Between the food court, the hospital’s generator and the many vending machines I had enough food, fuel, and water for a hundred people. I even have enough work to keep me busy and happy, just making blots for my crossbow and thinking of new weapons. I just have to make sure I stay sane enough to enjoy all my wonderful blessings. I crash back into my recliner and, reaching for another hand-carved bolt, I think back to the night it all started.

It’s funny how a small mistake can change one’s life. I locked my car keys in the lab that evening. Laughing embarrassedly I turned back just as my colleague was opening the elevator door. There were a few doctors inside the elevator, and their white coats were splattered with blood. I heard my friend’s screams as soon as he entered the small metal tomb. Running towards the descending elevator I pounded on the metallic doors. Looking back, I wonder what I was planning to do. Fight three or four zombies unarmed?

The 911 number played a recording informing whoever called that all lines were busy. There was an emergency and we should stay inside, barricade ourselves, and wait for further news. Who was I to question a robotic voice telling me to hide? I ran back to the lab and locked the germ-proof doors. Nervously, I scanned the familiar cold room, expecting some insane cannibal doctor to jump at me. I was alone, surrounded by lab equipment, freezers with urine and blood samples and, thank God, a few computers with internet access.

Google was down, as were most websites on the West Coast. Luckily, the BBC website was still up. I browsed the headlines feeling nauseous. Most articles were just a few hours old and looked very much the same: “Zombie attack!”, “How to kill the undead,”, “Do not trust those bitten.” I skimmed the pages, wondering how the hell I could have ignored all of this for so long. News articles dating back almost two months warned about plagues in Europe, Asia, and the West Coast. Some politician in France pressed NATO for the usage of the nuclear bomb. An Israeli general ordered a draft of all the Jewish population. The whole world was crumbling to pieces, and I had had no idea. I had been too preoccupied by my own problems to listen to the news.

I searched the internet for hours. Spamming my girlfriends’ inbox with desperate messages and trying to find someone who had a plan. There were countless pictures and videos of the undead happily munching on the living. Wikipedia was updated every few seconds with entries about another Z-territory; that was apparently the proper term for an infected country. Someone erased the whole section on zombies and replaced it with a big font “AAAAH, THEY’RE COMING.” If the internet was an accurate mirror of the world, everything was going down the drain.

I finally found the blog of a renowned neurologist in Zurich. Locked in his lab, he updated every few minutes as he performed a biopsy on his bitten assistant.

“There are four clear signs of the Z-Virus,” he wrote in his latest post. “Those infected moan almost constantly. Their eyes are fixed and seem glazed over. They do not breathe and they have an easily distinguishable smell of rotten meat. Also, be aware that it takes about five hours since death occurs for those infected to transform into a zombie,” the German doctor explained in between pictures of dissected zombie tissue.

But I knew he was wrong. I remembered seeing at least one of the doctors in the elevator when we arrived in the building, just three hours ago. Even more, they didn’t moan, and their clear, normal-looking eyes fixed hungrily on my friend. They did not look pale and dead, they looked every bit like any other human. I left an angry comment describing what had happened and continued browsing the web.

Slowly, reading countless posts and forums, I was able to piece a theory together. The zombie virus had mutated. It made sense in many ways. Europe was hit by an early strand of the virus, version 1.0 if you will. Traveling through Asia and then somehow making its way into the U.S. the virus transformed to respond to the local fauna.

I found a video shot in the suburbs of Tokyo. Five people suddenly collapsed in convulsions and jumped up within minutes, ready to kill. They ran towards their prey, screaming something in Japanese and cornering a young couple. Still swallowing pieces of flesh, they looked up with bloodshot eyes, searching for more prey. Less than thirty minutes later they dropped dead, only to rise again, slowly dragging their limbs and moaning.

A short scream for help somewhere in the distance makes me leap up and rush to the ledge. A group of new zombies runs down the highway, ready to join the hundreds already surrounding the hospital. They all look fresh. Their skin is not yet yellow and decomposed, their eyes look normal, and they can still run. Probably some unlucky survivors who manage to hide for the last few weeks decided to make a stand or dash for escape, or maybe they ran out of food and they became desperate. It didn’t matter, they got bitten and now they were slowly decomposing corpses. I sigh disappointedly and return to my chair. I haven’t seen one single survivor since the outburst started and I doubt I will anytime soon.

The strand of virus that hit the United States was probably the most dangerous. Instead of affecting the spinal nervous system and then spreading to the brain, it worked the other way around. It collapsed the frontal lobe, spread to the temporal lobe, then eventually made its way towards the spinal cord. It eliminated one’s personality and large portions of one’s memory, but left the rest of the brain in almost perfect condition; until it killed you completely, of course.

That was why the virus had managed to spread almost everywhere. The few of us who were prepared, had expected a slow, moaning undead corpse, like the European or African zombie. Instead we got a bunch of people who sounded human, looked human, and killed you without mercy.

All over the country families barricaded themselves in their homes, but instead of a rotten moan they heard cries for help or “Hello, how are you?” They knew from TV that zombies couldn’t talk or knock on the door politely, so they opened the bolted doors. Just like my friend who ignored the bloodstained scrubs and entered the elevator. Those were his colleagues, his fellow doctors, not undead monsters. Why wouldn’t he enter the elevator? By the time you realized you were wrong it was too late and you had someone’s teeth lodged in your arm. Professor Schneiderman would have been proud of my theory, if his brain still allowed him to feel anything at all.

I spent almost two days hiding in the lab, posting on every forum and blog I could find. Slowly refining my hypothesis and trying to warn others about it. Sometimes I received grateful answers. Often, I found more stories that supported my idea. A group of survivors in Oregon saw a police bus trying to save some women who seemed surrounded by zombies; only to get bitten themselves as soon as they stretched their arms trying to help. The women were still crying for help as they bit into the police officer’s flesh. A woman in Colorado saw a man attack a zombie and kill it only so he could eat a corpse himself. There were countless stories going around the internet and I read them with a mix of shock and horror.

I continued posting messages for my girlfriend, but if she ever saw them she never answered and slowly I realized I was alone. By the second day fewer and fewer new posts would pop up on the many zombie survivor forums and more websites wouldn’t load. Scared I asked for advice and one or two survivors scattered around the globe encouraged me to find food and maybe other humans in the hospital.

During the second night, after the last forum I could find on-line went down, I decided to try my luck and leave the room. I had a few candy bars in my backpack but by now I was starving. Besides, the garbage can I used as a toilet stank up the room and I was certain I would get infected soon if I didn’t get fresh air. I printed all the information on survival and how to improvise weapons that I could find. I memorized three pages of best responses in crisis scenarios, and I felt as ready as I was ever going to be. The many forums helped me overcome my shock and the few posts encouraging me to seek help motivated me. I was alive and if I wanted to stay so I needed to act. Looking back, I wish I would have thanked all those strangers while I still could, they probably saved my life.

I had converted a metallic table leg into a club of sorts and I used a garbage can as a shield. Luckily, there was no one on the third floor, and I could make my way into the nearest bathroom. I took back as much water as I could and I broke open the mint dispenser. The next day, I broke a candy machine and twisted my primitive club beyond repair in the process. In a utility room I found a red, metal axe stored among the fire extinguishers. I still thank God for that amazing tool.

Even so, armed with an axe, it took me almost a week to dare visit the lower levels. Now, I know it was foolish to have delayed. If there were any zombies that accidentally found the stairs and smelled me I could have been trapped in my lab until I starved. I had to secure all entrances and clean the building as quickly as I could.

When I finally dared to sneak towards the lower building I only found three zombies. One was a janitor locked inside of a quarantine room. I blocked the door leaving him to scratch the bullet proof glass. Another one was trapped in the vent and only his legs were outside. I gave him a good push and blocked the passage. The third one almost bit me as I was breaking a vending machine open. Luckily, it still retained some of his speech abilities and called out before it attacked me. I turned in time to side step away from him, and he crashed into the wall. He was a big man, probably twice my size, and I was lucky that he had yelled before attacking me. I hacked him to pieces as he screamed bits of unintelligible phrases in a harsh voice. Later I would return to study his decaying tissue and complete my theory but then I just crashed, glad to be alive.

The first floor was the worst, but it was not nearly as bad as I had expected. Later, I found out from the surveillance cameras that most of the zombies had left the building within the first few hours of the outburst. Almost all the tapes showed the same scene: one doctor or nurse collapsing in convulsions, two or three people rushing to help them and being bitten. When there was nothing alive left in the building, the undead wandered outside, searching for more food. I wondered where they would go when there was no more food outside either, but I found that out soon enough.

On the third day after I barricaded the doors on the first floor and secured the basement, the first pack of zombies appeared in the deserted parking lot. They were all doctors or nurses, and they seemed drawn by the building, crashing into its walls in a wave of human flesh. I was curious if they could smell me or if it was the familiar sight of the hospital that made them come back. Ironic that even after dieing, we try to arrive at work in time.

Within a week, I couldn’t tell the doctors from the construction workers, the bankers, the teachers, the prostitutes, and all the other kinds of undead. I could just tell that there were more of them every day. Sometimes they would arrive at night, other times they would just show up in a pack coming down the interstate, like St. John’s Hospital was the holy grail of zombie-hood. I cursed them and threw improvised Molotov’s. I contemplated suicide several times and almost hung myself one cold, clouded morning. But what was the point though? In the end I decided I might as well keep all the moaning undead entertained. Maybe some poor bastard, somewhere else, would be able to make a run for it, as I put on my little distraction, although I had no idea where the hell you would run.

Over the last weeks I managed to isolate the virus and analyze it. I knew almost everything about its biological properties and I developed dozens of theories on how it could have appeared. I watched the zombies gather every day and I probably killed around a thousand. Did it matter at all? Probably not. Anyone who could appreciate the difficulties of my survival was dead anyway. But I did have a perfectly secure building to call my own and I could sunbathe in the nude, drinking Coke and shooting zombies with a homemade crossbow. I was living the modern American Dream, might as well enjoy the blessings of my situation.

I aim at another undead, a fat one with a funny moustache, and I shoot, narrowly missing his frontal lobe but hitting his left eye. He falls, and I take another bottle of Coke. I should probably make another run and get more sodas from the vending machine on the first floor. The sun is still up, and this is going to take a while.

—–

Bio: Alex Moisi is a Romanian born college student, living in Illinois and ignoring real life issues like angry friends and failing classes in favor of post-apocalyptic scenarios and disturbing “What if?”’s.  His work can be found in a few e-zines and on-line at www.dracken.co.nr.

State Schools for the Disabled had long been abolished. Yet there were still children born slow, or with odd twitches, or personalities that didn’t fit the norm. And as medical science came closer to making us all perfect, society’s definition of perfection grew ever higher. And those who couldn’t be clipped or trimmed or smashed into the mold, fell to the wayside. And fell through the cracks to this place.

I wondered if it was another malnutrition case, since the cognitive therapists tended not to notice picky eating causing nutritional deficiencies. “When did it first happen?”

“The first case? Oh, we’ve had autistics for years. We took them in before they were no longer in mainstreamed programs.”

We briskly crossed through a double set of double doors. It was like an air lock, but worse. Air locks were to keep you safely inside. These were to keep everything inside from getting out. Once in, it took too much effort to get out quickly. That’s what kept the “students” in.

“I meant the first time you realized that it was transmissible.”

“Several of our slower students began to withdraw. They stopped responding to everyone. When they finally came out of their non-responsive state, they were anti-social. They attacked anyone who came in. Though, thank goodness, not each other. Otherwise, we’d have a real disaster on our hands.”

The nurse glanced at the double doors ahead of us. The airlock into their containment area. With two double doors on either side of us, this was as private as our conversation could be.

“Non-responsive state. Were they unconscious?”

“Everyone here sleeps a lot. They slept more than usual.”

“Fever?” I asked.

“Not much of one.”

“Any behavioral changes afterward? Anything of a definite pattern?”

“Loss of coherent speech, even in those students who had limited speech capability before. They moan incessantly. Mostly listless movement.”

“Any sores or lesions?”

“Some have sores or rashes. Then again, despite our significant efforts to maintain the utmost hygienic standards, some of the students do contract skin infections.”

It was a canned defense, and we both knew it. I wondered how often these students were bathed. “How about appetite?”

They don’t drink. There’s a loss of appetite for real food. They’ll bite anyone they can, though, so be very careful.”

Rabies suddenly reared its ugly head in my mind’s eye. Loss of rationality, inability to drink, biting … and “students” who might not know that the rabid animal approaching them is a dangerous thing, not a new friend to have and hold. A few other rarer diseases crossed my mind, but were put off to the side. “Why do you say it is transmissible autism?”

“The first student we knew had it was diagnosed as autistic upon arrival. And the symptoms as it spread were like autism. Lack of social skills. Lack of coordinated speech. Inability to interact with others. Limited situational awareness. Lack of concern for sensation, but retreating from it, too.”

“Retreating from it?”

“Oh, they’re avoiding light.”

“That wasn’t in your report.”

“There wasn’t much to put in the report.”

“You think you have an outbreak of a disease that causes one of the most severe mental disorders still untreatable, and you don’t put significant details in the report!” My voice echoed off the walls like a gunshot. Rabies, rabies, oh, god, its rabies. “What triggered the red alert that brought me here?”

“One of the staff was bitten by a child. He’s got the same symptoms now.”

Students contracting autism for an unknown time didn’t matter. But, heaven forbid, a normal adult is affected – then it matters! “Has the biting been a problem?”

“They’ll bite anyone that goes in.”

“How did the staff member – an orderly, I presume – get bit?”

“We had one of the annual audits. We had to produce the child to prove it was here, to continue with the funding per head. He tried to muzzle it, but he was surrounded by several other children before he could get out of the room. Then another child bit him. Possibly two. We’re not sure. They were swarming around him. He had protective gear on, we always do when we go in, but a few teeth got past.” The nurse grimaced.

“You’ve let them deteriorate to the point that you go in wearing body armor, and it’s all business as usual.”

“We don’t want it to be like this. We’ve tried to adapt. We need more funding. More support. There is only so much we can do.”

“You’re right.” The nurse wasn’t my enemy, it was the pathogen. “Are there doctor’s reports I haven’t seen? Ones that didn’t make it to the report I received?”

“None of our doctors will deal with the situation.”

“The situation is a suspected pandemic.”

“The infected are actually easier to handle than some of our more violent patients.”

“They pass on a debilitating illness that robs someone of their senses by BITING!”

“They hardly eat. They don’t drink. They don’t scream for Mommy. They’ll stare at the TV once in a while. They mostly sit and stare at anything that moves. Dump 50 in a room, and they don’t fight each other. Most of the time.”

“Most of the time?” I asked. My voice was a professional ice, the equivalent of a vocal poker face.

“We put an autistic child in once, one that we weren’t certain was infected. He was bit repeatedly. He slept for a day or two, then woke up, and acted like them. He lost all of his limited communication ability and previously mild social skills.”

“Why did you put an unaffected child in with afflicted ones?”

“He was autistic, and had shared a bedroom with ones that had previously been afflicted. We weren’t sure of the mode of transmission. We put all suspect children in to the same holding area to protect the rest.”

“Do you segregate students on basis of diagnosis?”

“No, ability level.”

“What levels?”

The nurse paused, not sure of my background in psychology. She decided to be mostly honest. “The ones that are mobile and reactive, but not much more, are where we’re going. The ones in a coma, the vegetables, are in a separate ward. The ones that are active and interactive, nearly normal, are in the wing closest to the entry.” Where they’re seen by visitors, I did not add. “These nearly android, zombie like ones need the most care but get the least. Then again, they have the least potential.”

“There are confirmed autistics working as veterinarians, lawyers -” no, bad analogy, given all the dumb lawyer jokes – “With a lot of work and support, they could be functioning members of society.”

“We don’t get the support to do that,” the nurse retorted. “So we do this.”

“Fine.” We both had a job to do, and I couldn’t do more of mine until I saw the patients. “Let’s go.”

The nurse opened the doors. I memorized her key code combination, in case she decided to leave me in with the infected. I had, after all, been told much that they might not want to leave here. I specialized in rare and dangerous diseases. We’d found more than one bioterrorism outbreak. Then there were the failed genetic engineering experiments and exotic murder cases. Oh, yes, it was best to be paranoid. Then again, one didn’t end up in my job without high attention to detail and a little paranoia were part of the job requirements.

The doors to hell opened. The clear lexan windows gave full view of the infected. The nurse was disgusted and dismayed. I was merely horrified and mortified. “Aren’t they changed or bathed?”

“If you want that done, you do it.”

Their clothes hung off them as if never changed at all. But the “students”, ranging in age from 5 to 15, didn’t seem to care. They weren’t all starvingly gaunt, but none had a healthy color. All were pall or grayish. As the nurse and I approached, the closest ones shuffled up to the window. One pointed and moaned. Moderate awareness of people. At the moan, several more students shuffled up and put their faces to the window.

I looked about for signs of terrible neglect. There were a few scattered food plates and stepped on meal bars. The water fountains were spotless. There were no piles of human waste. “Your staff are doing a good job of keeping it clean, in light of that. There’s no feces or other bodily fluids on the floor.” There were a few spots that might have been dried blood or sputum, but there was less here than had been in the front lobby.

The nurse seemed startled out of her inward reverie. “We aren’t sending anyone in to clean. We just shove in the afflicted students. We don’t even go in unless we have to.”

“At least they have enough capacity to use the bathrooms and clean up after themselves. Jesus, I’d hate to try to send in an orderly to clean up if they were puking or pooping on the floor. ”

The nurse was very quiet for a long time. She was staring at one corner of the large holding room. I followed her gaze. It was the row of toilets against the wall. They were spotlessly clean. Cleaner than the toilets in jails or other crowded holding areas. Even cleaner than the one at the hotel last night. I realized then that the nurse was lying to me. They’d scrubbed the facilities down before I’d arrived. Our conversation in the airlock may have been a delay so that the place was spotless. Well, except for the filthy clothes on the kids.

“They aren’t using the toilet,” she muttered, as if noticing it for the first time.

“Aren’t you feeding them?” I asked, gesturing at the nearest food slot. A few pellets and food bars of questionable age sat in it.

“We don’t add more food until that food is gone.”

“How old is that food?” I asked. I wouldn’t want to eat it, even if starving. Then again, how little appetite did these kids have? And how much was this disease slowing down their bodies?

The nurse trudged up to the signature sheet, as if it would have killed her to do so. “The food was last delivered three days ago.”

“How much food?”

The nurse looked up from the papers, looked directly at the floor, avoiding sight of the students. “All of the food now on the floor.”

“Fifty kids, three days, and none of them ate any of a dozen food bars? Then what are they eating?” Even if their food was that bad, they’d still have eaten it. What else could they be eating? Their waste? I nearly threw up at the thought, though it made as much sense, given the cleanliness of the room.

“Show me the orderly,” I commanded. Being more recently infected, he’d have more answers for me.

I wondered about anemia at the sight of his pall skin. He tried to bite me. I had the nurse secure the muzzle. I donned a protective biohazard suit as well. The nurse put on mere surgical gloves. “I’ve checked him before. His IV is fine. His fluid levels are fine.”

This patient, at least, received care. And by her precise methods, it was clear she was capable of giving quality care. She then pulled the damp pad out from under him and replaced it. He was generating output, then. Kidneys running, if little else. Well cared for. “How long has he been like this?”

“Four days.”

The orderly began to moan softly. She reached up to stroke his cheek. I wondered about her relationship with the orderly. What it was. What it had been. What it would likely never be again. “There’s someone here to cure you,” she said. The moan got louder. “Do you keep him sedated? He was quiet when we entered.”

“He only reacts when someone comes in.”

“Situational awareness.”

“Yes.”

“Does he react more strongly to you?”

“Yes,” she said with more than a little pride.

“Are you the primary caregiver?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone else come into physical contact with him?”

“I am NOT sleeping with him!” the nurse screamed.

“I meant, is anyone else touching him! I’m trying to assess contagion risk!” I screamed back.

“No! NO one else! All right! Fine!” she then stormed out to the hallway, slamming the door to this private room. It was like a hospital room except for the glaring lack of equipment. Then again, it was right near the afflicted “holding area”.

I decided to take a blood sample and run it in my suitcase lab. When I tried to get a good vein, I couldn’t find one. When I jabbed him and suctioned out blood, I expected a yelp in pain. The moaning never changed in pitch. I pulled the plunger back. The blood was a diluted brown. Clearly, there was something working here. I put it in the lab’s sampler pit.

It spat back the weirdest set of results I’d ever seen. The fluid was mostly saline, with some deteriorated blood in the mix. No viable cells at all. Oxygen deprivation would explain the mental deterioration, but did not explain the blood sample. I took different tissue samples. It all registered as cadaver. I took a saliva sample. There was a little residue there. Mostly saline, a little liquefied protein, and some sort of pathogen.

I e-mailed the results in a broad message to everyone on my mailing list. If I got accidentally infected, I wanted everyone possible working on a cure as quickly as possible. I’d lost more than one colleague because they’d waited until ill to send off data in hope of a cure.

The patient got quiet again. I decided to take a neural tissue sample. I rolled the orderly onto his side so I could get a spinal tap. It was then that I saw the open bite wound on the butt. Torn off open tissue. As if someone had come up from behind and literally taken off a chunk. How much effort had it taken to do that? How had a child done that? A sick and deranged teenager? It oozed what might have been puss or lymph. I took another sample out of habit.

I stared at the wound as the lab unit crunched. There was a little dried blood. No fresh blood. No sign of healing. No sigh of anything except early stage necrosis. I started back at the patient. Except for lung movement to bring in air to exhale the moan, there was no bodily movement. I pinched off the IV and checked its blood pressure. There was no blood pressure. There was no pulse. Then I restarted the IV. I pulled the patient onto the side. The wound had dried while the IV was off. Now it was freshly oozing again. I lowered the body back down. The pad beneath the orderly was a little wet. I checked the lab. The residue from the wound was saline, with a few proteins. From degraded human tissue.

I held complete still. The moaning stopped. And, with it, all breathing motion.

No blood pressure. No real breathing. No heart rate. Dead. It was a corpse. A moaning, biting, mobile corpse. Living dead.

I e-mailed the latest test results to colleagues. I had two thoughts. One was to run like hell from this hell on Earth. The other was to burn it to the ground, to create an inferno, to keep it from spreading. Then I wondered how the contagion had gotten here in the first place. It had started with a new autistic student, mixed in with other autistic students. I wondered how that first student had been infected. If it had infected others. If my other colleagues had found other institutional outbreaks. This outbreak of whatever it was had been unnoticed for weeks. How long could it go unnoticed?

There was a disease at work. Spread by mostly biting, and maybe other physical contact. It’s 100% fatal, but then you’re not dead. I nearly began laughing hysterically at the thought. How do I explain a fatality rate with a room full of moaning, shuffling, stupid zombies?

I took the lab unit and e-mailed my will to a few friends. Then I downloaded a few personal forms to work on. If anyone was concerned about my e-mail traffic on their network, they’d see a gigabyte of forms to be filled out on the incident. Justification for my network traffic. An excuse for all the time at my computers, if they had cameras watching me.

As I scrolled down a few pages, the nurse returned. “Do you need any help?” she asked.

“I’ll like your help in filling out these forms,” I offered.

“You’re supposed to be independent,” she retorted.

A dozen different thoughts ran through my mind. I needed more data, and I needed to be out of here. “I probably cannot help the infected children. They’ve been infected too long.” Her eyes became veiled, as hard and cold as those dead ones in the other room. “I can’t determine exactly what is afflicting the orderly, but I did get usable results. However, if I can’t get a clear and concise analysis, I can’t get a diagnosis, much less a cure.”

“Can you cure him?” she asked, hopeful.

“I don’t know what can kill the pathogen,” I politely tried not to lie.

“Do you know what might help him?” she asked.

“If I don’t know the disease family, I don’t know what the cure would be!” I let the emotion come out. I needed her to get me – and hopefully herself – out. “All I know is that I need more data, more samples, more studying – and I need your help.” I pulled back on the neediness. Too much, and it might be fatal for the two living souls here. “He’s infected with a serious disease. I need your help to fill out the forms so that I can explain what I see without contradicting your reports.” All said to get on her side.

“Can’t you get a team in here to try and help?”

“Do you really want a full team in here?” The nurse looked ambivalent. “Bring a team in here, and he’ll rot -” I tried not to laugh at the literalness of it “- in here. Give me some input on the forms. Help me to get him classified as ill, but not such as being stuck here,” and me, as examiner, with him. “We’ll get him to a hospital, with all the medical equipment and labs -”

“To save him?”

I nearly shouted in praise to the higher powers that she’d jumped to the answer I didn’t want to say. “To save everyone,” I corrected.

I packed up my lab kit and followed her out the door to the main hallway. The students were lined up against the glass, their dead eyes staring at us. The dull moan reverberated the glass. As the airlock doors closed, I thought I heard other moans around us. Echoes of the dead walking, I reassured myself. I had a transmission vector. I had a pathogen. I had shared my data far and wide. Perhaps someone might find a cure for that orderly. If there was a cure for life after death.

The nurse took off her surgical mask while we stood in the airlock. I let her chat about life in the outside world. I didn’t take off my biohazard suit off in the airlock. I didn’t want to do that until I was in my truck, sealed off in my own safe world. As the outer doors opened to the rest of complex opened, she took off her surgical gloves. I saw a mild skin abrasion, a little blood visible, a fingernail bit stuck in it “What happened to you?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.

“I thought about what you said, so I put fresh food pellets in for the students. One of the students scratched me.”

She looked at me funny as she realized the potential risk. “Do I need to do something?” she asked, suddenly afraid as it dawned on her.

“Go get a shot of gamma globulin. Maybe two.” She took a step toward me, wanting the expert’s help. “Go! Fast! Anything to boost your immunity! You don’t want to get infected, too!”

She was racing to the infirmary to get the gamma globulin. As soon as she was through that door, I ran for my life in the opposite direction, to the outside doors. To the outside world. Where it might be safe. If the disease hadn’t spread, if it stayed contained here.

Here it had been kept from spreading, and all others were safe within these walls and security systems. Here was safe and contained against the walking death until the expert to bring an answer and cure had come. And now it was among the living, soon to kill that nurse, infected. And she’d die because of the compassion for the living I’d reminded her of.

I got out the doors, my laptop and portable lab bouncing against my hip. I got in the truck and started driving. I couldn’t, wouldn’t take the biohazard suit off. I was on the highway when I finally stopped the vehicle.

My mind never stopped racing, but my heart did. I had decided not to go to my usual lab when I heard the booms overhead. Sonic booms. I looked up through the windshield. A soft whistle, almost like a moan, rushed from the sky to the buildings I’d just fled. If the results had gotten to someone who could help …

The ground shook from the explosions. The fire was so intense that my car grew warm. I pulled onto the interstate and started melting miles away. It would be a while before they thought to look for me. I found an old road off the interstate under a tangle of old bridges. I pulled off the highway and pulled the truck under the bridges. As the vehicle pulled under the trusses, I heard my mobile phone chirp. A locating signal. And here, it would scatter and give false readings.

I’d get out and burn the suit. Burn the whole vehicle. Then I’d get out and start walking. There was a wide dangerous world out there, but it couldn’t get worse.

As the vehicle burned brightly against the night sky, I felt at peace I’d evaded death so many times today. I was going to live.

Then I heard the dull moan again. It came from several places beneath the bridges and underpasses, both around me and above me. They avoided the light of the fire, but they didn’t seem to be avoiding me. As they approached, all I could think of was the lost potential. Of the kids, of the orderly and the nurse who might have had kids of their own together. And being a disease expert, I refused to become a vector. I remembered the bombing of the facility, that fire must then cleanse, as it so often does. I jumped into the flaming vehicle, and could only think of my own lost potential.

A full hour after he saw the running woman, a crash in the hallway drew Vincent away from Peter Gregg and his unspeakable perversions. He took off his spectacles and stood up, gritting his teeth against his lower back pain which had been a niggle at thirty, a nuisance at forty, and progressed to chronic discomfort around his fiftieth birthday. He walked gingerly across the office and opened the door.

He poked his head out into the corridor. Down the left hand end, near the stairs, he saw a man standing over an upended rubbish bin. The scattering of chip packets, soft drink cans and screwed-up cling wrap appeared to have this man confused. Vincent’s first thought was that a patient had gone AWOL from his room (perhaps a disorientated schizophrenic), but as Vincent ambled down the hall that assumption faltered.

“Wilson!” he called out to the wing’s newest intern. “Are you all right? What are you doing?”

Wilson responded to Vincent’s voice, but his vacant, upturned eyes in his dead slack face slowed Vincent’s feet. He had closed the gap between them to about five metres when Vincent noticed Wilson was missing his right ear and an egg-sized chunk of flesh on his jaw. Blood had turned his powder-blue shirt collar a dreadful dark brown.

“Wilson?” he said.

Already some instinct, some phobic self-preservation mechanism was sounding a shrill alarm. But Vincent’s rational mind asserted itself.

He took a single step forward and extended a caring hand. “Wilson, are you okay?”

The sound that emerged from Wilson’s mouth–a cross between a cat on heat and a man suffering emphysema–made Vincent withdraw his hand as if it had touched something slimy and offensive. Before Vincent could expend a single thought, Wilson lurched forward and reached out with clawed hands whose intent could not be misconstrued.

Vincent took two retreating steps and then turned, breaking into a fast walk–the top speed his rheumatic back would allow. He kept checking over his shoulder, afraid those gnarled, ashen hands would fall upon his neck, but whatever ailed Wilson also appeared to impede his gait.

Vincent stumbled into his office and shut and locked the door. A second or two later Wilson crashed into it, uttering another of those coarse moans–hunger, misery and despair rolled into one. He began to scratch at the door too, like an animal seeking shelter from a bitter winter night.

Vincent did not realise he had been backing away until his legs bumped into his desk. He gave a silly cry of fright and sat down on something hard.

It turned out to be a little pocket radio, which he sometimes switched on if he wanted to listen to the news, follow a cricket match or just have some ambient noise. He flicked the ON switch now and scanned through the channels, hoping to find a bulletin. He had to traverse long bands of squelch and static before landing on a human voice.

“…is so far unclear. The infection appears to be transmitted via any fluid-to-fluid contact. As those affected seem to crave the flesh of the living, the most common mode of infection is a bite. Authorities have warned people to stay in their homes and lock their doors…”

The radio announcer continued to speak, each word further dislocating reality. Can only be killed by severe brain traumawas one phrase that rang over and over again inside Vincent’s head.

Once the announcer began to repeat himself, Vincent switched off the radio and sat in his chair to think. Wilson continued to scratch and scrape at the door, providing a discordant soundtrack that put Vincent’s teeth on edge and turned his blood to sand.

He couldn’t stay in his office. He had no water and no food, and whatever Wilson’s physical shortcomings now, he appeared gifted with extreme patience and singleness of purpose.

Vincent cast an eye over his desk, looking for anything that might serve as a weapon. He collected up a handful of biros (glad he had always opted for fine point nibs) and put them in his shirt pocket. He rummaged through his desk drawers and also turned up a letter opener–a Christmas present from 1995 according to the engraving.

There were other items he could have used as bludgeons but they were bulky and awkward and he suspected nimbleness would soon be a prime asset. He stood up on numb feet and walked to the door. The scratching and scrabbling continued, shaking the door in its frame. Vincent didn’t like the way the letter opener felt in his hand, slick and slippery. He switched it to his left hand and wiped the right down the length of his shirt. When it was dry he switched the letter opener back again and cocked his hand above his shoulder, willing it to make no more sweat.

Vincent placed his free hand on the doorknob. The lock was the button type, which disengaged automatically when the knob was turned from the inside. Wilson seemed to sense Vincent was closer, his hungry moan escalating into a ravenous wail. Vincent shut his eyes and inhaled a deep, calming breath.

He pulled open the door and stabbed out blindly with the letter opener. The pointed tip could have gone anywhere, but by good fortune it plunged into the yellowed jelly of Wilson’s eyeball.

The creature that had once been Wilson let out a deep-throated howl as blackish fluid trickled down its cheek. The distraction proved momentary, however, and its remaining eye rolled back to look upon Vincent as a gourmand might look upon a fine dining menu. Its hands flashed out, much faster than Vincent expected, and grabbed his shirt with cruel, desperate fingers. It opened its mouth to expose pristine white teeth–young, strong, sharp.

As it leaned in for the bite, Vincent struck out with his hand. The heel of his palm connected with the letter opener’s blunt hilt and drove it deep into the creature’s head. Another jet of liquid (this one pea green with red tendrils) squirted out onto Vincent’s hand. The creature’s remaining eye lost its starved intensity and seemed to regard Vincent with a cool detachment. For that suspended moment Vincent thought he saw Wilson’s regular (albeit bloodless and anaemic) face, but then the eye rolled up into its socket and a corpse fell back, its head hitting the hard, polished floor with a skull-splitting crack.

“Sorry, Wilson,” Vincent said, wiping the intern’s brains on the seat of his pants. As he stepped over the body, some long-ago biology lesson reminded him the blackish fluid in the human eye was called aqueous humour. At this point, it seemed an inappropriate name indeed.

Arming himself with a new biro, Vincent looked both ways down the hall, undecided. To the left were the stairs Wilson had come up; at the other end was a lift. Each serviced the same floors and was equidistant from the front door, which was right beneath Vincent two floors down.

Finally he opted for the stairs, figuring they would allow him to assess the situation step-by-step, whereas the elevator would leave him unprepared until it drew back its heavy steel curtains on whatever godless production now played out on the ground floor.

Vincent started up the hall, trying to keep the hard leather soles of his shoes quiet. He wished he could take them off and flit barefoot to safety, but his back would never permit it. For some months he had contemplated wearing sneakers at work but had resisted in the name of professional pride–a pride he now regretted.

He halted at the top of the stairs and craned forward. One flight led to a small landing, then a second flight descended to the second floor. Vincent could see down to the landing and the first couple of steps thereafter. They were unpopulated except for a drab moth stuck to the wall. Only the air conditioning made any noise, filling the passages with its subliminal burr.

Using his free hand to grip the handrail, Vincent started down the steps, staying on his toes to keep quiet (and spare his back). One at a time, careful, methodical. He stopped twice to look over his shoulder, but nothing came shambling after him.

Vincent paused on the landing to dry his pen hand again. He took a ragged breath and was about to proceed when a zombie appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Vincent tried to become a living statue. The zombie had a severe wound on its right ankle and it shuffled forward in half steps. Vincent did not recognise this one–in fact judging by its dark green uniform, this zombie had until recently worked as a courier.

It got about three-quarters of the way past the steps and Vincent had begun to entertain the idea of respiring when the zombie stopped. It tilted its head, as if trying to pick up a scent, then pivoted on its good leg until its glazed eyes were upon the stairs.

Vincent remained motionless, but when a dry-throated keening rang through the stairwell he knew the time had come to fight or flee. He put the pen between his middle and ring fingers so it stuck out like a marlin spike and started down the steps, ignoring the volts of pain firing into his spine.

The zombie climbed one stair, its teeth bared and a trickle of saliva running down its chin. Vincent zeroed in on the slightly opaque pupil at the centre of its left eyeball. As Vincent thrust his pen at the target, the zombie’s weakened ankle buckled and the creature toppled to one side like deadfall. Vincent’s momentum pushed him forward and he teetered on the edge of the fourth stair, his arms flapping and tilting for balance. When he felt himself about to tumble, he hopped forward like a geriatric jackrabbit, clearing the remaining stairs. His shoes slapped down on the landing and excruciating pain speared into his back. He crumpled to the floor, his face screwed up like waste paper.

He was still seeing multi-coloured stars when he felt the zombie’s cool hand flop down on his own. Vincent snatched his arm back and made as if to lash out at the zombie until he realised he had lost the pen in his fall. He scrabbled backwards, trying to ignore his watery, canting vision, and selected another stationery weapon from his shirt pocket.

The zombie crawled towards him, one arm extended, like some unthinkable living-dead child reaching for a toy. Vincent rolled forward onto his knees and jabbed at the zombie’s eye.

He had apparently exhausted his fluke reserves for the day, because the pen tip hit the zombie on the cheekbone and drew a deep green line up to the bottom of its lower eyelid. Some blood began to ooze from the line, but the zombie appeared not to notice or care, snapping at the exposed flesh of Vincent’s wrist.

He felt the zombie’s dry lips brush his criss-crossed wrist lines. One of its incisors dented his skin before he yanked his arm out of harm’s way and tried to wriggle back again, his shoes slipping and skidding on the smooth concrete. He kicked out at the zombie’s gaping, yowling face and his shoe’s solid heel caught it under the nose. There was a satisfying crunch and the zombie fell back, a syrupy maroon blood coursing from its nostrils.

Vincent gritted his teeth against a new round of back pain and pressed his advantage. He sat up onto his knees and brought the pen down in a stabbing motion, popping through the zombie’s eyeball. With the pen thus lodged, he used his fist like a hammer to drive the plastic-and-ink nail as far in as it would go.

The zombie began to spasm, like a man in the grip of an epileptic fit. The words severe brain traumaechoed through Vincent’s head. He unsheathed another pen and jammed it into the zombie’s remaining eye, pounding it down.

The zombie stopped moving, became silent. Vincent dropped back, panting, his brow shining with sweat. Pain signals still issued from his lower vertebrae, each one a warning against any further activity. His ex-wife had always nagged him about staying in shape, and he wondered now if she had not been justified.

His back still throbbed like an infection when Vincent heard the scuffing of footsteps to his left. He rolled onto one elbow and stretched out his neck so he could see around the banister.

Three faces, crabbed and pallid with red-rimmed, rheumy eyes, regarded him from midway up the first flight of stairs down to ground level. When the zombies saw what they had only heard and perhaps smelt before, their eyes became harder, lighting with purpose, and they all began to mewl like a litter of demon kittens.

Behind this new line of zombies were three more.

And three more after that.

Vincent glanced down at the single pen left in his shirt pocket.

He pushed off with his hands and got up, only just aware of the searing fire burning at the base of his spine. The entire stairwell down to the bottom floor was a seething, moaning caterpillar of the shambling undead.

Vincent turned tail and took off down the first floor corridor, an overdose of adrenaline permitting a bow-legged jog. His intended destination was the elevator. As he went his eyes darted to the cells installed in a zig-zag along the passageway. If one were to peek through the small, wire-enforced plastic windows, one would see the worst of the worst criminals whose mental health was in question. The doors were secured with electronic locks that could only be opened via a pass-card. By protocol, a doctor was not permitted go into one of these cells without an officer (or ’screw’) as an escort. Vincent had never found a need to challenge this protocol.

He got to the elevator and slapped the down-arrow button, wheezing like a horse with lung worms. He figured the zombies were akin to sheep, following sounds, scents and one another mindlessly from one meal to the next. With luck, the majority of those on the ground floor were now making their way to the first, leaving him a relatively unencumbered path to freedom–and whatever lay ahead.

The lift, an old campaigner from some antique year in the twentieth century, squealed and clanked as it made its laborious ascent. Vincent flicked a look over his shoulder and saw half the corridor still remained between himself and his slow-footed pursuers, but their closer proximity nonetheless speeded his heart rate. He slapped at the down arrow again, hating how irrational that action felt.

The elevator sounded a low-register ding, more like bung, and the doors trundled open.

In the microsecond before it flicked the panic switch, Vincent’s mind showed him a tin of sardines. Then the wedged-up zombies spilled from the elevator, teeth bared, arms reaching.

Their numbers saved Vincent from a certain fate, as they fell over each other like puppies competing for a spare teat. He looked back down the hallway and saw no feasible hope in that direction. The leading zombie was no more than ten metres away, his stiff-legged march fast swallowing the safety buffer.

The first elevator zombie disentangled himself from the awkward mass of limbs and made a grab for Vincent’s calf. Vincent jigged away and scrambled to the first available door, swiping his pass-card at the reader on the wall. Its little red light went green and there was a beep-click as the lock disengaged. Vincent pushed his way into the cell and slammed the door behind him. Two seconds later, a shrivelled face filled the small viewing window, its haunted eyes rolling and straining in their sockets. One eyelid was missing and it left a smeary red mark on the plexiglass.

“Well hello, Dr Gardiner. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

Vincent whirled around, hands out to stave off an attack, but Peter Gregg only sat on his bed, back against the wall and one knee tucked up to his chest.

“Now don’t you worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” Gregg said. He had a long drawl, like some rural simpleton, but it could not entirely mask the cold intelligence beneath.

Vincent lowered his hands. “Anna Gretski might suggest otherwise,” he said. Anna Gretski was Gregg’s niece by marriage and his last victim. He had bitten all her fingers off and then drowned her in a backyard pool.

Gregg laughed. It sounded like a howling dingo. He motioned at the droopy face peering in through the miniature window. “Something bad going down out in the real world?”

“Something…” Vincent agreed. He had spoken to Gregg a dozen times, but never in such an informal manner. He felt like a headmaster socialising with a student.

“That’s real helpful, Doc,” Gregg said, descending into more wild laughter.

“Apparently people are … turning. The media calls them the ‘undead’. They don’t know what’s causing it yet, but some scientists think it’s a saliva or blood-borne micro-organism. It makes them crave the flesh of normal people like … uh, well, like you and me. If they don’t kill their victim, he or she becomes one of them.”

At Vincent’s mention of “normal people” a leering grin had spread across Gregg’s face. Now he broke out in another gale of laughter, his chest heaving and tears rolling down his face. “Well, fuck me!” he said when he regained some composure. “Seems like we’ve got Peter Greggs everywhere now. Why don’t you go and talk to ‘em, Doc? Lock ‘em all up and give ‘em some therapy!”

The adrenaline high on which Vincent had been riding now slumped. For a moment he felt hollow and helpless, but then a boiling anger flowed into the void. “You think this doesn’t concern you, Gregg? You think you’re immune? You’re trapped in here too, you sick, stupid fuck. Why don’t you poke your head out that door and see what all your buddies, all your comrades, do to you?”

“Well, I might just do that,” Gregg said, getting up off the bed.

Vincent’s mouth fell open. “What?”

Gregg hitched up his navy tracksuit pants, like a man about to get stuck into some menial but important work. “Conversation in here is dull, anyway. I figure a few dinner companions might liven it up a little.”

Gregg’s eyes glinted like knife blades under an LED light. They took Vincent’s breath away. “Are you crazy?”

“So they tell me,” Gregg said, tipping him a bob’s-yer-uncle wink.

“I won’t let you,” Vincent said. He whipped his pass-card from his pocket and held it up, bending it between his thumb and forefinger. “Sit back down now or I’ll snap this in half.”

Gregg’s eyes regarded the pass-card but he did not move. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s the only thing keeping you alive.”

The two men, doctor and patient, held one another’s gaze. Outside the cell door zombies moaned, as if unable to bear the tension. After three endless seconds, Vincent released the pressure on the pass-card.

“We’re dead if you let them in here,” he said.

“You’re dead if you try and stop me,” Gregg replied, advancing on Vincent. He was ten years his junior, stood a full head taller and suffered no back ailments. “And if I have to kill you, your death will be a lot slower and more painful, I can tell you that.”

Gregg grasped the card, but Vincent did not let it go. “How do I know you won’t kill me once you have it?”

Gregg just gave him a great white shark grin.

Vincent relinquished the card and circled around with his back to the wall, never taking his eyes off Gregg–whose own eyes were glued to the pass-card, as if it would open a treasure chest instead of a door to dozens of ravening zombies. Not sure what else to do, Vincent got up on Gregg’s bed, thinking a height advantage might help him avoid the inevitable a little longer.

Gregg went to the pass-card reader. He looked at the card in his hand, then at the door, then at the reader again.

He really means to do it,Vincent thought. His stomach felt like a gurgling tar pit. He removed the one remaining pen from his shirt pocket and held it up as if it were a dagger. He thought he was about to chuckle at this, until a small groan slithered out.

Some vital connection happened in Gregg’s brain and he swiped the card. There was a small beep and a loud metallic click as the lock disengaged.

The zombies tried to surge in (and Vincent’s heart gorged into his throat), but Gregg had his slippered foot pressed up against the bottom of the door. One bald, cadaverous head and several arms entered the cell, but nothing else. The bald zombie snapped at Gregg like a jaguar, its teeth severing the air.

With a speed and deftness that made Vincent’s skin crawl, Gregg slapped his hand around the bald zombie’s neck and yanked it inside. He used such force that the zombie fell flat on its face and skidded several feet along the floor. Gregg then slammed the door on two other heads trying to gain access–once, twice, three times, until blood stained the door jam and the heads retreated.

The bald zombie was clambering to its feet. It saw Vincent and its dead eyes filled with a haunting, primal half-life, the glow of base instinct. Vincent shuffled backwards to put the bed’s full width between them and menaced the zombie with his less-than-intimidating weapon. This seemed to goad it, and it staggered forward, snarling and gnashing until its knees barked the steel bed frame. It looked down, confounded for a moment by this unexpected barrier, then dropped forward onto its hands, squeaking the mattress springs.

Vincent stepped back off the bed, preparing to thrust forward again and skewer the zombie’s eye. But he got no further than preparation, because as he put his weight on the hard floor, pain jolted up his back. He cried out and sank onto his haunches, then dropped to a sitting position–which delivered another flaring telegraph along his spinal column.

The zombie’s face, twisted with idiot hunger, appeared over the side of the bed. Vincent tried to wriggle in retreat, but he was almost paralysed with back pain. Tears of agony and terror squeezed from his eyes.

All at once, the zombie disappeared–or so it seemed in Vincent’s blurred vision. When he wiped away his tears, he saw Gregg had the zombie by the shirt collar. Keeping the danger end turned away, he coiled his arms and then propelled the zombie face first into the front wall. There was a loud smack on contact, like someone slapping a green coconut, and then the zombie did a graceless pirouette, flopping into the corner.

It appeared dazed for a moment, but then a primordial fury took over. It lumbered forward, arms outstretched, hands clenching as though it could already feel Gregg’s neck between its fingers.

Gregg did not move. Vincent could only see his profile and he looked like a granite sculpture, cold, fearless. The zombie’s hands fell on Gregg’s shoulders and its mouth yawned, preparing to take a chunk of hot flesh.

Gregg bit the zombie’s wrist first.

Brown blood welled up around his teeth and dripped down onto his chin. The zombie’s eyes started out, seemingly appalled that Gregg had upset the natural order of predator and prey. Gregg spat a gobbet of the zombie’s own flesh and blood into its face and then punched it in the midsection. It tripped over its own feet and plopped to a sitting position against the wall, eyes rolling between Gregg and the dribbling wound near its thumb.

“You shouldn’t bite off more than you can chew,” Gregg sermonised.

Vincent used the bed like a crutch to get to his feet and then shuffled forward until he almost stood next to Gregg … forgetting in the moment that the man had been convicted of killing a cop and cooking his leg in an oven like a Sunday roast.

Vincent studied the zombie’s eyes. Were they different somehow? The manner in which they examined the injury, the way they looked at Gregg–they seemed … brighter. Yes, that, and also the zombie’s complexion had begun to fade from the sullen caste of a rainy sky to a softer pastel grey.

In the following seconds it went white, almost translucent, and then more familiar colours flooded back into it–pinks, browns, the blue hints of deoxygenated blood.

He–for it was a he now, no longer an it–blinked eyes that were alert if rather puzzled. He rose slowly and glanced at the blood drizzling down onto his fingertips.

“Did you bite me?” he asked Gregg.

Gregg just smiled. Without looking at Vincent, he proffered him the pass-card and said, “I think you should leave us now.”

Zombies groaned and slapped senseless hands against the cell door. Vincent frowned. “Are you cr–Forget it, Gregg, I’m not going out there. And I’m not leaving you in here with him.”

“How did I get in here?” the ex-zombie said.

Gregg did not respond. Instead, he turned to face Vincent and drew his fleshy lips back from two rows of equine teeth.

“You have two choices, Doc.”

Vincent swallowed nothing and almost gagged on it. His face and hands felt electric. His eyes flicked like blue and white pinballs, from Gregg to the bewildered ex-zombie to the door and back again. He sized up his patient’s husky frame and compared it to his own. His back twinged a reminder notice, or perhaps it cast a vote.

Vincent took the pass-card. He swiped it past the reader and then bared his teeth like a frightened terrier.

——

Kris Ashton has published short stories in a range of magazines and anthologies including Spinetingler, Mysterical-E, AtomJack, Blood, Blade & Thruster and Back Roads. His first novel, Ghost Kiss, was recently released through Asylett Press. He lives in Sydney, Australia, and unlike his stories, he doesn’t bite. Visit him online at www.freewebs.com/krisashton.

Saint Mercy Regional is an acute care facility located just outside Springfield. We have a fully staffed ER trauma center and beds for two hundred patients. It was about midnight when we got our first walking dead. He came bursting in the doors and started biting people. Nurse Pamela frowned and then called the man over to her desk. She put a clip board on the counter facing the patient and slapped a pen down on it. He looked down at the form, a puzzled look on his face.

“No one gets admitted without filling this out.” she said.

He picked up the pen and aimed the fine point metal end at his face and plunged the instrument in and then dragged it sideways across his pasty good looks. When he was through his upper lip hung down like a curtain hanging by one hook and blood was squirting onto the phones and the magazines piled on the counter.

Pamela wasn’t new to the health care system, “I’ll also need to Xerox your health insurance card.” she said.

* * *

At about this time I was upstairs in operations co-coordinating air evac and ER. This had nothing to do with the plague of zombies. I didn’t even know anything strange had transpired downstairs. I was busy on the cell phone talking to the medic on Mercy Bird One as he was cleaning up a highway accident. The med-evac crew is supposed to be able to turn to the hospital for guidance in unusual situations. The medic wanted advice. I was getting a little angry.

“What is it you don’t understand about our triage policy?” I said, into the phone.

The voice from far away seemed stressed. “Well, normally the dead don’t run off with the gurneys. A whole bunch of dead people have formed two teams and are having a race down the highway with the gurneys. They aren’t going very fast, but they seem to be very competitive, with members of both groups ripping off their own arms and throwing them at the competition…” he paused. I could hear him take a deep breath. “I’m usually very good about the triage; I’m usually very down with the triage policy. I do like my job, I’ve always thought it a good idea, that part about dealing with the dead only after all the injured are taken care of… just… well, this time… it just seems the dead are so much more insistent on getting in the helicopter than the living. You ever see films about the last days in Saigon? It’s like that, the embassy roof all over again. The injured have all run away, one of them running on broken legs. One of the cops had a guy handcuffed, I think he was the driver who caused all this, but the guy just ate through his hands and got the cuffs off.” His voice wavered. He burst into tears. Sobbing he said, “It’s just a little chaotic and I thought you could give me some advice.”

“Look… all I know is if you follow procedures your ass is covered. They can’t fire you if you go by the manual. Triage.” I said. “Triage. Triage. Triage. That’s been the mainstay at Mercy Regional and there’s no other way for you to be fair to your clients.”

“I’ll try.” He said.

“Good.” I said. “We’ll have two men standing by on the roof to help with transport. When you get settled come see me. We can get some food at the cafe’. I’m buying.”

“Think they have the grill running?”

“Till two A.M.” I said.

* * *

I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a steady stream of zombies drifting into the hospital. After ten all the elevators are controlled; if you get in any of the big elevators you can only get to the basement, the main floor which included the ER, or the ninth floor – elective surgery. At night, the main door stays open out front, but only because it is adjacent to the emergency room. The staff is supposed to intercept people drifting in off the street. That system broke down. They came in. Groups of zombies came in. What they did was cluster outside, a whole pack of them looking a bit like a rugby scrum; then when they noticed the nurse was busy, they would quickly shamble to the elevator and get in. Usually they went down. After an hour the basement was full; and I mean packed like a mosh pit. Blood was all over the floor and walls. The slightest whim had the whole group surging down the corridors like a tidal wave looking for Kurt Russell’s new movie. One found a phone and somehow managed to call the director of facilities.

“Light.” he said, after placing the call. The word was said very clearly, even though blood came out of the zombie and poured onto the handset of the phone.

“Station twenty?” It was a maintenance man trying to verify where the call was coming from.

“Light,” the zombie said spilling more blood. Then, “Kill”. Then, because he just heard someone else say twenty he said, “Twenty.”

The lights in the basement went out.

The zombie made an appreciative grunt.

Thinking it was a request for an adjustment, the lights came back on, about half as strong as before.

During the next three hours the lights would quickly wander from incandescent to non-candescent as the maintenance man tried to respond to some repetitive and gagged, imprecise instructions coming from the phone.

The crowd in the basement noticed the changing lights and were motionless for a few moments, silently savoring their improved circumstances. A few zombies started small fires adding a soft red glow and dense smoke to the hellish basement experience. One of the zombies liked the changes so much he tried to applaud, but found he couldn’t manage a complicated task, so to celebrate he ground his own face into the concrete wall until his neck was an empty stump.

* * *

On the ninth floor, where it was otherwise very quiet, a tiny sound made a tiny announcement; a tiny musical note announced the arrival of an elevator. This time it didn’t contain a rugby scrum. This time it was a lone occupant who stepped from the elevator doors. Many of the patients on the ninth floor would have recognized the arriving passenger. He was a surgeon, Dr. Mark Mywards, a handsome young surgeon who specialized in elective surgery. He was stopping in to check on Mrs. Berkling, she was sleeping at the hospital, waiting for her surgery. She was having something done around her eyes. Something un-important. (Hadn’t her doctor already told her she looked marvelous?) Her room was one of the VIP rooms: a room with a huge plasma screen TV and a real bed and a fake fireplace and decorative end tables; the kind of room most people don’t realize can be located in a hospital.

The doctor opened the door to Mrs. Berling’s room; he stood there with the light framing him. She knew by his outline that it was her doctor. He certainly looked care-free standing in the soft light. Myra Berling tried to learn a new word every day. Earlier she’d consulted a dictionary and had found the word, ‘insouciance’. She tried to use her new word. The doctor sure looks care-free, he looks, ‘insouciant’. She told herself. She guessed she hadn’t been mistaken by the silent messages he’d been sending her. He was here to seduce her, of that she had no doubt. Even though she was twice his age she was still vital and passionate. She sat up. She was wearing a very sheer night gown. The doctor walked past and stood by the big window. He was looking down at the city. From where he was he could see the fires, the burning houses and the broken police cars. He placed his head against the window. Even though the air conditioning was on high and the window very cold, he didn’t leave any fog on the glass when he turned to face the woman on the bed, he left a big chunk of his rotting scalp.

She was looking away; being demure. With her right hand she was patting the bed.

She only looked back in his direction when she felt his hard weight join hers on the soft bed.

Her first thought was, “‘Wow… he really doesn’t look that good when his hair isn’t combed.’ And then she screamed.

* * *

“I’ve always said new challenges call for new procedures.” I was talking to the staff; they were gathered in the multi-purpose room. I was up in the front, standing next to the big chalkboard with an overhead projector close-by in case I needed it. “Until further notice we are only admitting people without vital signs,” I said, “…people with no pulse, folks with fixed pupils, no blood pressure, zero brain waves, no reflexes, limbs kind’a jerking around, you’ll spot them after a little practice.”

Some podiatrist tried to question my authority “You can’t withhold medical treatment from the living.” he said.

“Show them the waiting room, they’ll move on.” I said. “And I’ve received a call from the governor designating this as the central medical facility during this crisis. If you find you have to call an HMO for any surgical permission, don’t you dare mention that the patient is dead. If they ask you’ll have to tell them, but it’s not a question they’re used to asking, at least not yet. Also, about the crash carts. I know how much you guys like to use the crash carts; just so you know, they won’t be any use for the next few days. Speaking for myself, I feel it will be nice to get through an entire day without somebody rubbing paddles and yelling ‘clear’. On another point, the president has called out the National Guard; at first the phone just rang and rang but eventually somebody answered. It turns out the man answering is the last available National Guardsman who isn’t busy at the moment doing terrorists, the border, storm clean-up, or the war. So the good news is help is coming. The bad news is, it’s one guy; a guy named Herbert Millstone. As a civilian he used to sell vacation condos. When he gets here don’t let him show you any pamphlets. I’ve also been informed that, congress has announced temporary medical benefits for the walking dead, to help pay for this emergency. When you have dealings with any of the walking dead try to get them to sign up for coverage. There are seventy-five different plans so there should be one well suited to your particular patient. Make sure you and your patient look at every single plan and then choose the right one. If your department has extra manpower or needs extra help don’t be afraid to let me know.”

In the back of the room a nurse held up her hand. “We can send you some staff from the nursery.” She said. “The damn zombies ate all the babies.”

“Okay let’s get back to work.” I said “And remember, just cause we can’t cure them, that doesn’t mean we can’t bill them for treatment.”

Finis

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Bio: Tom Smith has been published more than 100 times with stories appearing in: “Nightmares” “Lullaby Hearse” and “Scared Naked Magazine”