Season of Rot
Eric S. Brown
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2009 Eric S. Brown
Introduction
You hear their moans and the sound of them pawing over each other to get to you. Swarms of them now flood the room as you load the last of your rounds into your gun. They’ve devoured your family, your friends, and you are the only one left, alone, isolated, empty, your soul shattered. They will kill you now in unimaginable ways, but you are determined to take some of them to hell with you. You aim and pull the trigger…
Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? Welcome to Eric S. Brown’s Season of Rot. Here you will find a sense of paranoia, dread, isolation, shock and horror, and all of it adeptly woven into one tasty, flesh-eating morsel.
I have worked with Eric firsthand on some projects in the past, and his stories have always captivated me. His bleak, intense world vision gets under your skin and makes you face the biggest, scariest “what if” you could ask… What if the undead took over the world and the last hope of humanity was an inch away from oblivion? Well, the zombie man, as I like to call him, delivers again with Season of Rot.
Eric has become known for turning out the most original end of days, apocalyptic, zombie-mashing tales around. From the get-go, his stories assault you with relentless action, twists and turns and enough human drama to give you nightmares for weeks. They’ll make you stay far away from cemeteries for as long as you can until the end finally comes.
Season of Rot does all this and much more. This isn’t just a zombie fest. It’s not just an end of the world scenario. It’s a glimpse into a universe, one created and orchestrated by Eric himself. If you think you know where this story is going, think again. It’s not your mom’s zombie story. Forget that old black-and-white Night of the Living Dead—this is full-blown color in your face. Season of Rot takes the zombie convention and turns it on its head.
I guarantee that you won’t know where the story is going until Eric wants you to know. He successfully reinvents zombie fiction and makes us think. His mix of characterization, plot and action is well done and makes us care. You will be with these characters all the way; they are alive, they breathe and you will beg to know what happens to them next. You will pick a favorite and follow them all the way through. You will feel their horror, their fear, their sense of isolation, their hopelessness and helplessness. But you will also feel their courage, their sense of community, their determination to live and their hope. Yes, hope. Hope in a world gone to hell. There are glimmers of it here and there, but you never truly know how it will play out, and just as you think you know, it sucker punches you.
In recent years Eric S. Brown has spawned more zombie fiction than you can shake a corpse at. From The Queen to Zombies: The War Stories, to his most recent Zombies II: Inhuman. In these tales you will find no ordinary zombies. They think, act in groups, plan, communicate, run, and kill with intelligence. Through these tales you discover how much like us they are. They really are us. The enemy is within. They are our sisters, our brothers, our neighbors, our fathers and mothers. Everyone you could trust and love is now out to kill you and ravage your flesh, and it happens in the blink of an eye.
If anything Eric’s tales have made us analyze ourselves and the human condition, our interaction with each other and the world around us. For the battlefield, when it comes down to it, is the entire world. Eric has turned the formula of the living dead into a world-ending apocalypse. As if nuclear war, the greenhouse effect, disease and starvation weren’t enough, now we have the undead rising from their graves to end the world. And this is his universe, spanning volumes of stories, chapbooks, collections and novellas, all woven together to tell the ultimate tale of humanity’s survival.
Add to this The Season of Rot—a fine collection that only enhances this universe. From beginning to end, the book sucks you in with its seemingly simple premise, but then snags you deeply, forcing you to ride alongside these people as the unreal unfolds and the real story takes hold.
You might think that after all the zombie fiction there would be no new way of telling this tale. Eric shows you that is painfully untrue with his new offering of undead delight, a feast for his fans, an homage to all those who love the living dead.
It’s clear that Eric has much more to say on this subject, many more poor souls to thrust into a world overrun and overthrown by legions of the undead. It’s clear that Eric isn’t done twisting and turning this new icon and reinventing it. This tale, like his others, is no ordinary zombie tale… it has bite.
Prepare for the Season of Rot; it’s going to be a rough season, one you won’t soon forget. Grab your shotgun, your hunting knife and food rations, and turn the page, brave fan. The Season of Rot has just begun.
-John Grover
Author of Terror in Small Doses, Shadow Tales, and Space Stations and Graveyards.
Season of Rot
One
Daniel dangled his feet over the edge of the demolished stairwell. Two floors below, the creatures waited, stretching their decaying arms toward him. Frustrated, unable to reach their prey, they pushed each other and occasionally knocked one or two of their brethren off the jagged end of the stairs. Daniel imagined the bottom of the stairwell, dark and littered with broken bodies, masses of them crawling and dragging themselves about, unable to work their way back up the stairs or find their way out of the hospital.
When Daniel and his group took refuge here, they destroyed the stairs and cut the cable to the elevators, leaving the dead no way up to reach them. The effort had proved well worth it; now the refugees could sleep in peace.
Daniel shifted the rifle across his lap and checked its chamber, then lifted the gun to his shoulder and aimed at the horde below. Only a headshot, or general destruction of the brain, would send the things back to Hell. Daniel found a target and squeezed the trigger. The rifle kicked as the high-velocity bullet tore through the dead thing’s skull in an explosion of wet pulp. It was a futile gesture, really: millions of people, nearly everyone in the city, had turned into walking mounds of rotting flesh whose sole purpose was to tear off your face and eat it; Daniel and his group could never kill all of them. But he enjoyed it from time to time. He joked that it was his tiny piece of vengeance.
No one from the floors above came running to investigate the shot. They knew Daniel was on watch today and were accustomed to his habits.
Aside from Daniel, more than four dozen living souls called the hospital home. They collected rainwater on the roof, tried to grow crops in or on the building wherever they could, and rationed out the dwindling supplies from the hospital’s cafeteria and emergency stores. They’d moved the generators and the fuel supply to the upper floors and had limited the use of electricity as much as possible. Even so, their time here was running out. One day soon, if help didn’t come, they’d all be forced to pack up and move... assuming they could find a way through or past the thousands of creatures occupying the bottom three floors of the building and surrounding its walls outside.
Daniel sighed and lit up a cigarette. He was down to three packs and getting nervous about the supplies running out. Luckily only two other people in the group smoked, or the cigarettes would have been gone already. He took a deep drag and held it in, savoring the taste before exhaling. Glancing at his watch, he noticed his shift was almost over, and hoped it wasn’t an omen of some sort. He stood up, thanking God he could return to his real job in the communications room, and headed out of the stairwell to meet his replacement.
***
Laura sat up in bed as the coughing fit hit her. She threw back her blankets and slammed her bare feet onto the cold tile in a frantic dash for the bathroom sink. She stumbled into the room, wearing only a t-shirt, and she grabbed the sink’s edge to support herself as the coughing grew more intense. What she hacked up was more solid than mucus and drenched in blood. She stared at it in horror as the coughing died down.
Letting go of the sink’s edge, she slid to the floor and tried to catch her breath. I’m a doctor, damn it. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to her. She had never touched a cigarette in her life. She worked out and ate right, yet here she sat dying of cancer in a time where people needed her skills and knowledge more than ever.
No one else knew how sick she was. She hid it well and put up a good front. The hospital was stocked with the medicine she needed, enough medicine to curb her symptoms and keep her comfortable most of the time. At least it had been enough until things began to get worse.
With her t-shirt, she wiped the blood from around her mouth and got to her feet. Today was going to be a busy day. Not only was she the doctor of the group, she was also a member of its leading tribunal, a responsibility she shared with Jack and Vince.
She was also supposed to be finding a cure for the plague, but that was a joke. She wasn’t a research scientist, just a doctor, and even after months of studying the plague she knew little more than when she started.
Today, her focus was on her administration duties and helping Jack and Vince agree on an evacuation plan for when the time came to find a new home. According to Jack’s last inventory check, even with their rationing system they had a month, tops, before people started starving and their tiny piece of the civilization collapsed into mutiny.
Laura changed into her day clothes and put on her happy face. Then she headed out to meet up with the boys.
***
Jack stood on the roof of the hospital, looking out into the city, parts of which were still ablaze. Dark smoke joined the usual clouds of lingering smog, making the day seem pale like the rotting flesh of the creatures on the streets below.
It was hard for Jack to remember what the world had been like before the creatures came. Less than a year ago things had been normal, but the plague had spread so fast that no one, not the government, the military, nor the C.D.C., had been able to stop it. The city around him had changed from his home to a sick version of Hell on Earth where only the strong and the determined stayed alive.
Jack was a tall man and well built. Standing there on the roof he looked every inch a king, and in a sense he was. This new world had forced the burden of leadership upon him.
He lifted his binoculars to his eyes, trying to figure out a path through the dead. The only vehicles he had at his disposal were locked away in the hospital’s garage. They were mostly simple cars built for civilian use, not for fighting through a horde of hungry, flesh-eating monsters. The only larger vehicles were a few dump trucks left behind from his work crew. None of them were what he needed, and even if they were, reaching them would be a problem.
The safest way to the garage was a long and difficult climb down an elevator shaft. At the end of the shaft dozens—maybe hundreds—of the creatures waited; like the first three floors of the hospital, the garage was infested with the dead. There simply hadn’t been time to close it off when Jack and the group had taken refuge here.
Some of the other refugees still believed help was coming, but Jack suffered no such delusions. Any survivors out there were certainly in the same sort of mess his group was in, or at least incapable of breaching the armies of the dead to rescue them. There would be no help coming. It was up to him, to them, to find their way out of the city—if there was one. Any attempt to escape would cost them lives, but Jack was willing to accept some losses for the greater good as long as some of them survived to carry on. And as long as his ass wasn’t one that got chewed off along the way.
***
Clutching a beat-up Daffy Duck doll in his sweaty palms, Chris made his way down the winding hospital corridors to the nursery. In a few moments he would see his daughter for the first time. The doctor, Laura, hadn’t let him stay during the delivery last night. There had been complications with the birth beyond his understanding. He’d been forced to wait outside as Natalie entered the world and his wife Rebecca left it.
He had watched as Jack and Mitchell carried her to the roof, her body wrapped in bloodstained sheets bound with thick ropes. Chris had cried and screamed, had even tried to attack Mitchell, but Jack calmed him down. “Think of your daughter,” he had said, as if giving an order. “She does need you.” Chris knew he was right and did his best to hold in the sobs.
He tore the hospital apart after that, looking for a gift he could take to his new daughter. At last he found Daffy inside a desk drawer in one of the offices. He sat and stared at the doll for hours, weeping for Rebecca, himself, and Natalie. He managed to pull himself together just as Laura found him and told him he could visit his child whenever he was ready.
Before he went in, Chris walked around and gave himself time to prepare, letting his excitement drive away the horrors of the world. Finally, he was ready. He ran the last few steps to the nursery proper, and as he rounded the corner he saw his daughter and stopped dead in his tracks. His breath left his body as if someone had punched him in the gut.
Beyond the nursery window, a nurse cradled the newborn, trying to soothe her as she cried and waved her tiny arms. Chris took a deep breath and stepped into the room. The nurse smiled and held Natalie out to him just as he held out the doll. He reddened, embarrassed by the mix up. And then he took his daughter into his arms, and his heart nearly burst with pride.
***
Jack and Laura waited in the conference room for Vince to arrive. As usual he was late. Jack gritted his teeth and, scowling, checked his watch again. Laura hoped Vince would show up soon; it looked like Jack was on the verge exploding.
She picked up the stack of inventory reports Jack had brought her, then thumped them down on the table, straightening the pile of papers.
“Jack,” she started as the door swung open. Vince came in and plopped into a chair at the table. He hadn’t shaved in a day or two, and he wore a battered t-shirt, jeans, mismatched socks, and sneakers that had seen better times. Vince’s appearance was another sore point with Jack, who believed those in power should set an example for those they led.
“Good morning, guys,” Vince said cheerfully, ignoring Jack’s glares. “Sorry I’m late. I had a busy night.”
“So did we,” Jack pointed out. “Rebecca died in childbirth last night.”
Vince’s cheerful expression crumbled. “God, I’m sorry. Why didn’t you call me?”
“We did,” Laura said. “You didn’t answer your radio.”
Vince shifted in his seat. “Oh yeah, I had to leave it behind. I was doing some work up on the roof.”
“I was on the roof this morning, Vince,” Jack said. “You weren’t there.”
“No. I turned in around three or so.”
“What were you doing up there, Vince?” Laura asked, heading off an outburst from Jack.
“Brainstorming.” Vince smiled.
For a second, Laura thought he meant brainstorming for one of his novels. Although he had worked as everything from a dishwasher and taxi driver to a bookstore owner and photojournalist, Vince was primarily a horror writer, with the mindset and attitude of an artist. If he started talking about his writing, that would set Jack off like nothing else.
“I think I’ve come up with a way to solve our supply and escape woes,” Vince added.
Laura relaxed a bit. She really hadn’t felt up to playing her usual role as levelheaded mediator between Jack and Vince. Without her intervention she often thought the hospital would either become a pseudo-military dictatorship or fall apart completely from neglect.
Jack still seemed dead set on making her job difficult this morning. “Do tell,” he said sarcastically.
Jack was a hardheaded son of a bitch any way you looked at him. Before the dead rose and claimed the world he’d been the foreman of a construction crew contracted to remodel the hospital. He wasn’t a fool—the man held degrees in engineering and architecture. He was just too accustomed to being in charge. He’d grown up in a military family, so structure and discipline were almost holy to him. It was as if he saw himself as the group’s commander in chief. And at times he felt his way was the only way.
“Well, my plan’s pretty simple really,” Vince said. “The hospital has a helipad right?”
Laura sighed. “Vince, there’s no way we can get our hands on a helicopter, much less one large enough to move all of us and the supplies we’d need.”
“That’s it?” Jack asked Vince. “You were up there most of the night without your damn radio and all you came up with is the fact that we have a helipad?”
“Whoa, settle down, big guy,” Vince said, laughing. “We all agreed that we couldn’t reach the airport to get a helicopter, that’s true, but I was going over the maps of the city again and did you know the WKT station is only a couple of miles from here? You can’t see it with the binoculars, but I borrowed Chris’s telescope. The station’s got a copter sitting on its roof.”
Laura shook her head. “It’s too small for what you’re thinking, Vince. At best, it’d hold four people with minimal gear.”
“Yes, we couldn’t use it to escape as group, but we...” Vince saw that he had lost their attention. “Just hear me out, okay?”
Laura motioned for Jack to stay quiet for a moment.
“We send a small strike team to fetch the bird, but we don’t use it to escape. Once we have it, we’ll have a viable means of traveling around the city. Do you know how many other hospitals and buildings have helipads? A damn lot of them do. So we use it to reach those buildings, loot their supplies, or even fly out and land in less populated areas of the city to make ground raids. Sure, some of us will have to risk our asses to do it, but it’s a damn sight better than risking the whole group trying to make it out of here on the ground.
“And here’s the beautiful part: not only would food no longer be an immediate problem, but some of the buildings I’m talking about have fuel depots for birds like the one we’d be using. We’d also have a way to reach the airport and steal us a larger bird if we really needed to get out of here.”
“It’s risky, Vince,” Laura said. “There are so many things that could go wrong every time our raiding parties took the helicopter out, and dozens of ways we could lose the helicopter after we’ve got it... if we can even get it. One failed raid and we could be right back where we started with nothing to show for it except some of us being dead.”
“A strike team?” Jack laughed. “Just who the hell out of our little group fits that description? None of us have any military training. Hell, half of the folks here have barely even used a gun more than once or twice in their lives, and those times were in desperation after the plague hit.”
“Actually, Jack, I thought we’d go. Me, you, Mitchell, and Chris. And Daniel, of course. He’s the only one who knows how to fly a bird.”
“You’d take three of our strongest people and our only engineer on this fool’s errand? You’d actually leave Laura here with no one left to head things up if the hospital had to be defended?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Jack, we all have ‘basic experience’ or we wouldn’t be alive, would we?”
“Vince,” Laura said, “what you’re suggesting might work if the creatures outside were like the ones in the movies, but they’re not. Those things out there move like us. They’re fast and there are thousands of them. There’s no way a team could fight its way through them to the station.”
“You’re right, but they could leapfrog to it,” Vince said with a grin.
“Leapfrog?” Jack muttered under his breath.
“All we’d have to do is jury-rig some grappling gear. We could hop from one rooftop to another all the way to the station. How many creatures have you seen on the roofs? Not many. Only a handful of the things ever wander that high, and most of them either fall off or leave when they find that the roofs are empty. Chris used to be a professional mountain climber. With his help, it’ll be easy.”
“Chris’s wife just died last night,” Laura reminded Vince coldly. “He has a daughter to think of now. Even if he wasn’t an emotional wreck, I’m not sure he’d agree to be a part of your plan.”
“Leapfrog?” Jack repeated, laughing aloud this time. “Holy shit, you are crazy. This isn’t the fucking Matrix or something. We’re not superheroes. Going from roof to roof would be nearly as suicidal as facing the creatures head on.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Vince asked.
“Making a break for it with the damn cars locked up in the garage seems like a better idea than that,” Jack said. “And we all know there’s way too many of those things out there to make it, even if we armored the vehicles and wasted all our firepower trying.”
“I’m sorry Vince,” Laura said, hoping to cut Jack short. “Everything you’re suggesting is just too risky. Let’s drop it and move on, okay?”
Vince shrugged and gave up. He knew if Laura sided with Jack it was pointless to continue, even if he was right. That’s one of the things Laura liked about Vince. Though occasionally temperamental, he was generally laid back and didn’t care how things got done as long as they did get done.
She turned to Jack. “According to these reports, we have nearly four weeks of food and water left, right?”
Jack nodded.
“Then that gives us some time. Maybe we can come up with some other options.... One other thing from your lists that concerns me is the lack of weapons and ammo. If it does come down to a plan like Vince’s, Jack, can we realistically equip a team to send out and still have enough firepower here, should something happen?”
“Honestly, no. Even without splitting the weapons, if the dead found a way up to us right now we wouldn’t have enough here to make a real stand... but I don’t think that’s going to happen, or it would have already.”
“Point taken,” Laura said and leaned back in her chair.
“So then what the hell do we do?” Vince asked.
They all sat in silence.
***
Two floors above the informal tribunal meeting, Daniel had returned to his obsessive work in what he considered his own field. Though he had actually been a pilot before the plague, he’d also been a HAM radio fanatic and was the closest thing the group had to a communications expert. Since his first days in the hospital he’d been trying to reach other survivors using the radio equipment he’d found in the building. His efforts weren’t entirely futile. More than once he’d made contact with another group or person still alive in the world outside, even a few in the city itself. But they were always cut off from the hospital by either the dead or a lack of transport. The other survivors might as well have been on the moon.
The part that really depressed Daniel was that he never managed to stay in contact with any of them. They simply disappeared from the airwaves as if they had never been there at all. He told himself those poor souls had just ran out of power to broadcast or that they’d been rescued.
Daniel had boosted his signal as much as he could. His range was huge for the equipment he had available, but he still wished for more. He told himself that if he just kept trying, one day he would reach a group capable of coming to the hospital’s aid. He’d spent the last few days scanning the civilian bands, so today he switched back to the military channels.
His only radio contact with a military unit had been scary as hell. The soldiers demanded his location as if they intended to raid the hospital rather than come to their rescue. They hadn’t said that outright, but Daniel could read voices. They were his passion. Hell, for all he knew they’d already tried to reach the hospital and had been consumed in the attempt by the dead. He’d certainly never heard from them again. He never even told the others about them, and they were the one party he never tried very hard to reestablish contact with after they went missing.
Still, he was desperate. He hadn’t reached anyone in a long time, and he wanted, maybe even needed, to hear the voice of someone outside of the group. He needed to know they weren’t the only ones left.
Daniel made some additional adjustments on his gear, then sent out his usual message. “This is Saint Joseph Hospital calling anyone who can hear us. Please respond?” Daniel leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his unkempt blond hair. He nearly toppled over when the radio crackled with a reply.
“This is Installation Phoenix. I copy you, Saint Joseph. It’s good to hear another voice.”
Daniel rocked forward, grabbing the control console to answer his new friend.
“You have no idea how good,” he said, and then he laughed over the airwaves.
***
Alyson raised her head and looked down at Mitchell. A smile stretched across her lips as the bed sheets shifted over her naked, sweat-drenched body. “Was it good for you?” she said with a chuckle.
Mitchell ran his hand through her short, wet red hair. “You know it was. But I’ve got to get back to work. I’m on sentry duty, honey. Jack would tear me a new one if he knew I was here.”
Alyson rolled off him, her sweetness suddenly gone. “Just don’t forget to pay up on your way out,” she told him, stretching out on her back and closing her eyes.
Mitchell got out of bed and got dressed. He placed the packet of drugs on her nightstand and turned to glance at her a final time before he headed out the door. “Alyson...”
“Shut up, Mitchell. You know why I do it. I don’t need another lecture.”
Defeated before he began, he slammed the door behind him. Alyson sighed. Men were fools, all of them. Give them a good time and sooner or later they all started to fall in love with you. Fuck him. If she wanted to spend her last days as messed up as she could be, that was her choice. If she overdosed, then the end would be here that much quicker and she would be out of this hellhole. She wouldn’t have to wait for the creatures to find a way in and rip her apart; she wouldn’t starve to death like the rest of the assholes in the hospital.
Only Laura, Jack, and the medical staff had access to the hospital’s stash of pharmaceuticals, and if fucking people like Mitchell—who could get the keys from Jack every once in a while—got her the shit she needed, hell, it was only sex right? She wished she was brave enough to steal a gun or get one from Mitchell, brave enough to stick it in her mouth and pull the trigger. The drugs made her feel good though, and they weren’t anywhere near as messy. She knew that, given time, the drugs would do the job, and she was content on most days. With thoughts of slow suicide floating in her head, Alyson fell asleep in the darkened room.
***
“Vince, let it go,” Laura said, fighting the urge to give up and storm out of the room. Somehow the meeting had spiraled out of her control and had turned into a schoolyard spat as Vince and Jack resurrected one of their long running arguments.
“Laura, I know Jack and Mitchell are close, but come on! The guy’s a freakin’ murderer. I just don’t feel comfortable with him having access to so many key areas, much less the damn arsenal he has locked up in his quarters. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. The guy gives me the creeps.”
“Mitchell paid for his crimes,” Jack argued. “When I hired him he was already out on parole. He’s saved my ass more than once since I met him. I trust the man with my life, and he’s been instrumental with helping me keep things straight around this place.”
“Face it, Jack, he’s your muscle. A thug who’d put us all to the wall and blow our brains out if you told him to. God knows what he does when you’re not out there with him.”
Suddenly the door to the conference room burst open. Jack’s instincts kicked in and he drew his sidearm, barely stopping himself from putting a bullet through Daniel’s face.
Daniel stood in the doorway, wide-eyed and out of breath, staring at Jack’s gun. “Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand as if to block a bullet. “I... I just made contact with someone who can help us.”
Laura fell into her chair. “What? Who?”
“His name is Martin Kier. He’s military, holed up in some kind of huge bunker about a hundred miles south of the city.”
“Jeez, a hundred miles.” Vince whistled.
“How many in his group?” Jack asked, getting right to business.
“Just him. He’s the only one left alive there.”
“One man? A hundred miles away? How can he help us?” Laura was confused, but she knew there must be some reason for Daniel’s excitement or he wouldn’t have butted in on the meeting. He seldom left the radio room.
Daniel caught his breath and pulled up a chair at the table. “According to Martin, he’s the sole survivor of the base, yes, but the compound was built to house a couple of hundred people: scientists, military, high ranking officials. It’s essentially a giant underground fallout shelter, but it was being used as a research lab before the plague hit. There was a staff in place, working on various projects when the dead virus—or whatever you want to call—broke out. The base closed itself off automatically, trapping them all inside.
“Unfortunately, the virus had already breached the compound, despite its safety protocols. A war like the one in the city was fought down there, inside the complex. Unlike the military up here, they won. It was costly, but they did win. The virus mutated, though, and became airborne or something. I didn’t really understand all of what Martin was saying. It was a bit over my head. He made it through it all though. Now he’s just sitting around with years of stockpiled supplies: food, meds, weapons, even fuel!”
“Still, I don’t see how that helps us,” Jack interjected.
“I’m getting to that part. Martin is a pilot and it’s a military base. There are two helicopters there, both of them for military transport. He could easily reach the hospital by air and either bring us some of the stockpiles or take a few of us at a time to the base. It’s just a matter of deciding what we want him to do.”
“You’ve asked him about all this?” Laura asked, unwilling to accept that such a miracle could simply fall into their laps.
Daniel calmed down a bit. “Well, no. I haven’t asked him to fly us to the base, but he offered to bring the supplies we need without any prompting on my part.”
Vince placed his hands on the table. “That seems odd. If he’s willing to share all this stuff, wouldn’t it be easier to move us there rather than have him haul it all out here? Could he even realistically make that many trips? And why waste so much if he just brings part of it and decides to stay here when he lands on the roof?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel admitted, “but I trust him. I could hear the sincerity in his voice. He has to be lonely out there. I would be. Maybe all the stuff that happened down there is haunting him and he just wants out of the place.”
Laura nodded. “Okay, Daniel. If you trust him so much from one conversation, I’ll buy into his desire to help us, but how do we handle this?” She looked to Jack and Vince for their input.
“Have him fly over a run of supplies,” Vince replied. “It couldn’t hurt if he’s truly alone. There are nearly fifty of us. Numbers will be on our side even if he’s lying. Hell, a transport full of soldiers is something we could handle as long as we know when they’re coming. And if he’s telling the truth, we get the stuff we need and we get to meet him face-to-face and check him out for real. Then we can decide what to do from there.”
Jack nodded, agreeing with Vince. For once, the hippy had a well thought-out and sane suggestion.
“We’re agreed then,” Laura said. “ Daniel, go invite our new friend over for a visit. Jack, I want you and Mitchell to prepare for any of the darker things that could come from this.”
“We’ve got one surface-to-air missile left from the armory raid before the hospital was completely surrounded,” Jack informed her. “It’ll do just great if things go south.”
“What about me?” Vince asked. “Don’t I get a part in this?”
“Yes, Vince, you do. I want you to make a list of the order we’ll leave in if this Martin is for real and we opt to move to his base. Decide who’s best suited to make the trip first, and who needs to stay here until everyone else is safely there.”
“That’s it?”
“No. I want you to inform everybody as soon as possible. Not everyone may want to leave the hospital, and you’ll need to know who wants to stay. You can also prepare people for what’s coming, good or bad.” Laura stood up. “Well people, let’s get to it.”
***
Chris sat rocking Natalie, an empty bottle of formula below his chair. She cooed, gazing up at him with her beautiful green eyes, so much like her mother’s. Chris wrapped her blanket tighter around her tiny body as his mind raced with Vince’s news. He couldn’t believe it. Salvation had come to them out of the darkness. Hope was with them after all.
The base had to be huge. Full of tunnels and open spaces, protected by thick metal walls, concrete, and the earth itself. No more fear that the dead would find a way in. Natalie would be safe. She could grow up without living in fear. She would have places to play, big spaces where he could let her run alone. For years to come she would have a life more normal than he could have dared to hope for. When Vince asked if he and Natalie would be willing to go, Chris hadn’t hesitated in the slightest.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he whispered to Natalie as she fell asleep in his arms; for the first time in a long while, he meant it. He only wished Rebecca had lived long enough to see her daughter enjoy a better life.
***
Night fell over the city, embracing the hospital in its darkness. Thousands upon thousands of zombies surrounded the building, wandering mindlessly and biding their time, waiting for their prey to emerge.
According to Vince’s poll, not a single person—other than Alyson—refused to gamble on the new home that fate had offered them. Jack couldn’t blame them for risking it all. In the hospital you could see the dead if you bothered to look out, and you could hear their hungry voices calling up to you. Sometimes it seemed that the dead were using a form of psychological warfare against them, though Jack knew it was impossible. The creatures were just drawn to this place because they could sense the warm blood and flesh entombed in its walls. Entombed, he thought. It was such a perfect word to describe their situation. All of them, including him, were dead in the long run. They just hadn’t fallen down yet.
After helping Jack prepare for the guest—or guests?—who would arrive in the morning, Mitchell returned to Alyson’s quarters. She lay naked and uncovered on the bed, so drugged up she wasn’t even aware of his presence, her eyes distant, her mind drifting somewhere far away. He considered taking her just because he could. If she remembered later when she came to, he could always pay her, but in the end Mitchell dismissed the idea. He stood at her window, listening to the moans of the dead below. Their cries seemed louder tonight, more desperate.
On the bed, Alyson rolled over onto her stomach. Mitchell turned and took in her naked form, lusting after her despite the session they’d shared this morning. Physical release distracted him and kept him sane—if anyone in the place could be called sane. It was his escape, his drug. Alyson’s red hair was the fire that cleansed his soul.
He loosened his belt and walked toward the bed. For a while he would join Alyson in heaven. It would help pass the time until dawn.
Two
As the sun rose from behind the distant mountains, Daniel waited on the hospital roof, smoking one of the last few cigarettes to cope with the excitement and stress. Laura and Vince stood by his side, flanked by Jack, Mitchell, and two of Jack’s hospital guards. The men all held assault rifles, except for Jack, who shouldered their sole missile launcher, ready to fire the instant anything went wrong.
They heard the helicopter before they saw it, the roar of the engine drowning out the soft, distant noise of the dead below.
Daniel had brought a portable radio. He switched it on. “He’s coming,” he said to Laura, stating the obvious as the small helicopter made its way toward the hospital.
Vince watched it through a pair of binoculars. Jack studied it through the missile launcher’s sight.
“He’s alone!” Jack barked over the whump-whump-whump of the helicopter’s blades. “Or looks to be.”
Daniel’s radio awoke in his grasp. “Joseph Hospital, this is Martin Kier approaching your position. Do I have permission to touch down?”
Laura nodded at Daniel, then motioned for the others to stand down and clear the space for the bird to land safely. She thanked God that Vince persuaded everyone else to stay inside. The excitement over Martin’s arrival had reached a fever pitch. If it hadn’t been for Vince’s convincing nature the whole group of survivors might have been on the roof. It was chaotic enough with just the small group she had.
The helicopter landed and its engine shut down. The man who called himself Martin Kier took off his flight helmet. He stared at them for a second, appraising them through his thick, dark glasses before stepping out of the helicopter. Martin wore green military fatigues, and he never removed the heavily tinted glasses as he came to greet them. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, well built and of average height. His midnight-black hair grew slightly longer than the mandatory military cut. The man moved with feline grace as he offered his hand to Jack. “Hello.”
Jack didn’t take Martin’s hand. “You can call me Jack. The lady in the lab coat is Dr. Laura Smith. We’re the leaders of this group. That chain-smoker over there with the radio is Daniel.”
“Whoa.” Vince shook Martin’s hand and introduced himself. “I’m one of the people in charge here too. We’re damn glad to see you. Sorry about Jack. Being a rude, hard-ass is his reason for living.”
Martin smiled, or attempted to. The expression looked awkward and out of place on his lips. “I brought the food and gear you requested.”
Vince waved at the helicopter dismissively. “Don’t worry about that now. Good old Mitchell and the guys can unload it. I bet you’re tired from your flight, and we have a hell of a lot to talk about. Let’s go inside and get you a drink.” Half joking, he added, “You brought coffee, right?”
Mitchell and Jack’s men unloaded the supplies as Martin followed the others into the stairwell. Daniel tossed aside the cigarette he was smoking and stayed behind to scope out the helicopter, get a feel for the controls. He wanted to be ready in case something happened and he needed to fly it.
Glancing around the cockpit, Daniel saw the standard controls of a military bird. He’d only flown traffic copters before the plague, but the difference didn’t look too drastic.
Vince led Martin and the others down what was usually the quickest route to the conference room, but the hallways were clogged with refugees. They all wanted to see the man who had restored their hope. Vince hurried past them as quickly as he could, dragging the others with him as if by sheer force of will. With each person they passed Martin’s muscles tensed underneath his clothes, as if he expected the group to attack. Vince kept glancing at the twin side arms strapped to Martin’s hips, praying no one spooked the stranger enough to make those weapons leave their holsters.
On the trip down, Martin only paused once to really take in the people and the surroundings. It was when Chris, carrying his daughter Natalie, nearly bumped into them outside the conference room. Martin’s eyes went straight to Natalie and stayed on her as if he didn’t register Chris’s presence.
Finally, he looked up at Chris. “Is the child yours?” Martin asked, awed.
Chris nodded, unsure of how to respond.
Martin’s eyes drifted back to Natalie. “You must be very proud.”
Before Chris could reply, Vince shoved Martin into the conference room. “You can meet folks later, Martin. We really need to talk right now, okay?”
Martin glanced at Vince and saw the man’s fear naked on his face. “Yes, you’re right,” Martin agreed.
Vince closed the door behind Jack and Laura as they entered.
After he finished familiarizing himself with the helicopter, Daniel caught up to the group outside of the conference room. Martin could hear him talking with Chris in the hall, but he took a seat at the table anyway. Laura sat at the head of the table, facing Martin, and Vince and Jack sat on either side of him.
“So you made it, Mr. Kier,” Laura began. “There were those among us who thought you wouldn’t show, or that if you did you’d only bring death and trouble with you. It seems they might have been wrong.”
***
Out in the hall, Chris clutched Natalie close to him. “Did you see the way he watched my daughter? It wasn’t right.”
Daniel said, “Come on, Chris, he’s military. He may be one of those guys who are freaked out by kids. No offense, but I am too.” He laughed.
“No. It was more than that. He looked at Natalie like she was some kind of alien.”
Daniel put a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay, Chris. He kept his word and came alone just like he said he would. I think he’s been alone for a long time, as long as we’ve been cooped up in this hospital. Solitude will do that to a person. It can affect people in a lot of ways. He’s been through as much, if not more, than we have. He was just happy to see breathing people again, I’m sure.”
Chris shook his head. Cradling Natalie in his arms he walked off, leaving Daniel to frown after him.