The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious

  We lean on the corridor wall and wait to nab the nurse on her way out. Finally, when the urge to escape overrides politeness, I poke my head into the room. “Excuse me? Sorry, I just…I’m waiting for someone to help me with my mother. No rush, we’re just in the hall.” The feet shuffle, but there’s no response. I move away and lean beside Grace. “I don’t know if she heard me.”

  “She has to come out at some point.”

  I let my head fall against the wall. Half a minute later, we straighten at footsteps from the room. A woman in rumpled blue scrubs limps through the door, her face turned away. Her hands are covered in what could be blood, and her brown ponytail is knotted and scraggly. Something about her is off, but she’s clearly a nurse and can tell me what I need to do to get the hell out of here. I clear my throat again.

  She turns. Her mouth is ringed with blood that dribbles from her chin and coats the front of her scrub shirt. Her strange silvery-blue eyes fix on mine, violent and angry but somehow also lifeless. My mother went crazy a few times—drug-induced psychosis—but, even crazy, her eyes were wild and angry and alive. Not like this.

  Something is more than off. Something is extraordinarily wrong. I stumble backward into Grace just as two patients in blood-drenched hospital gowns enter the hall behind the nurse. Their eyes are pale, as if the color’s been sucked from the iris, and their skin is waxen. All three move toward us on jerky marionette legs.

  Grace whispers my name, but I can’t take my eyes off the creatures coming our way. Guttural sounds, part hiss and part groan, emerge from their open mouths, and the buzz in my brain becomes a whole-body hum of fear. They’re not angry—they’re feral. And they’re coming for us. There’s no doubt they are.

  Grace tugs my sleeve, pulling me back a foot. “Sylvie!”

  Grace, the rational one, should be talking me down, but her green eyes are circles of fright. I don’t care if this is an honest mistake we’ll laugh off in a few minutes. My gut screams to flee, and I trust it. We stumble the first few steps and then run for the elevators and stairs in the adjoining hall.

  We pass that stain on the floor. Still wet. Dark red. I felt disconnected before, midway between normalcy and my mother’s death, but now I’m fully present, adrenaline zinging and lungs just short of collapse.

  We round the bend to find an empty hall. Grace’s eyes are huge. “Is it the virus that—”

  She drags me back mid-step, nails digging into my forearm. Down the hall, a man has limped from the open elevator doors. His polo shirt is untucked, khakis torn, graying hair slicked to his temple with blood. Blood is smudged from his lips to his cheeks. His mouth issues that animal hiss. More people spill out with the same crazy eyes and angry snarls, and they all stagger our way. The stairs are past the elevators. We’ll never make it.

  I think I scream. My throat feels as if I’ve screamed. I don’t know if I yank Grace or she yanks me, but we run back to my mother’s corridor. The nurse is still advancing, with the two patients behind her. At a distance, I take in every detail I missed before. A clotted beard of tissue hangs from her chin. Blood bubbles down her lower lip. A tear in her scrub shirt reveals a savage hole in her torso in which ribs flash white and muscles flex. An organ, connected deep inside by a rope of flesh, bounces off her quadriceps with every step. Her pants are soaked red. No one could survive that, virus-crazy or not. It should be impossible she can walk at all.

  But she is. Her Crocs leave two ribbons of blood in her wake.

  Zombies.

  The thought is crazy, and I focus on our continued existence rather than entertain it. We can push through these three, maybe, and get to the double doors at the far end of the hall. We could hide in a room, but the patient rooms don’t lock. Grace’s head whips side to side. There are three in front and close to a dozen behind us. We don’t need to speak to know we should run. And our only way out is through.

  “The doors,” I say. My voice barely registers in my own ears, but Grace nods and takes my hand. Hers is as cold as mine.

  Shoe soles tap-drag behind us. Polo Shirt. Grace moves first, running for the nurse and patients, and pulls left when the three join ranks to meet us. She slams into the wall but doesn’t stop. They spin as we pass, and I shudder at the touch of a hand on my sleeve. Then they’re behind us, though I can feel them coming. This is every dream where I’m chased, where I fall and freeze as the monster closes in. The panic exploding in my chest is the same—no, worse—because this isn’t a dream. But we can run. We can leave the monsters behind.

  My mother’s room goes by in a blur. We crash against the push bars of the double doors. Locked. We pound the windows. Someone must be in the world that lies beyond—a sane, quiet world of empty hallways and clean tile floors—but no one comes. We spin with our backs to the door. The nurse and patients are almost at the nurses’ station half a hall away, and the others aren’t far behind.

  Hiding in a room is our only choice. A bad choice. Even if the bathrooms lock, we’ll be trapped. There’s no one on this floor to rescue us. Maybe there’s no one anywhere. My already overtaxed heart seizes at the thought.

  An elderly woman shuffles out of a room down the hall, her heels barely rising from her lavender slippers. Her hair is a fuzzy shock of white and her shoulders are stooped. She swivels her head toward the nurse and patients. She’s not one of them—she steps carefully, befuddled and blinking and, I’m pretty sure, about to die.

  The group veers toward her. “Go in your room!” I scream.

  She turns our way and shuffles another step, mouth hanging and eyes squinted in question.

  “Go back inside!” Grace screeches.

  The nurse seizes the elderly woman from behind, then pushes her to the wall and buries her face in her neck. The woman steps out of a slipper in her effort to escape on spindly, pale legs. Her thin, high wail rises above the hoarse groans that fill the hall, and her bony arms push once, twice, then hang limp. She slumps to the floor. The infected are down in seconds, faces plunging to her legs and arms and abdomen. The nurse raises her head, jaw working. She’s chewing. Eating.

  The virus. They said it made people violent. They didn’t say it did this.

  But there’s no mistaking it. And we’ll be next if we don’t hide. I don’t think they’ll be occupied for long. My mother’s room. I’m almost positive the bathroom locks. I drag in a breath. Grace trembles at my side. She whimpers, or maybe it was me.

  Another door opens, closer to us but just past the nurses’ station. A man enters the hall. “What’s happening out—”

  The crowd looks up. Stripped flesh hangs from mouths. The man stands unmoving for a long moment before he ducks back inside and slams the door. Polo Shirt and some others stagger to their feet, and Grace and I freeze like prey in sight of a predator. My muscles quiver and sweat tickles my back with the effort it takes to be still, to not run or scream or cower. Don’t see us, don’t look at us, I beg silently.

  Polo Shirt rams the man’s door. A tall woman in a blood-streaked peach suit pushes, her head shuddering and teeth bared. Her sheer determination is scary, and her frenzy is terrifying. She’s heated. Hungry. The others swarm the door. It gives an inch and slams shut. They thrust again. There’s no sign of cooperation between them, but they’re a relentless force.

  A high-pitched shriek comes from inside the room, followed by a man’s deep yell. The door opens. Shuts. Again and again. Now’s our chance, while they’re focused on the door. And on that poor man and whoever else might be in there with him. It’s an awful thing to be grateful they’ve found another distraction but, if they hadn’t, we’d be dead.

  My legs are jelly. I don’t have enough oxygen to run. We’re going to die, heaped on the floor in a pool of blood like that old lady.

  “My mother’s room,” I whisper. Grace’s head jerks in a nod.

  But we don’t get the chance—the double doors behind us swing back, depositing me and Grace on our asses. Hands lift me to my feet by my armpits. I k
ick at what turns out to be a living, breathing, cherubic-cheeked man in his mid-forties. His broad frame fills out his scrubs and his brown hair waves across his scalp to gather in a short curly ponytail at the nape of his neck. He backs away with his hands in the air, one of which holds a shiny meat cleaver. Two uniformed NYPD officers, one young, one older, flank him. The baby-faced cop moves to the doors while the gray mustachioed one stays back.

  The young cop motions down the hall. “What’s happening?”

  All the infected are at the man’s door now, although the nurse has started our way, organ bouncing.

  “Someone’s in there,” Grace says tremulously.

  Another shout. Another slam. The door opens three inches this time. The young cop strides down the hall, gun lifted. An ear-splitting bang rips through the air. The top of the nurse’s head erupts in a splatter. I duck at another roar and my eardrums thrum.

  “Kearney!” the young cop shouts.

  The older cop brushes past, raises his gun and follows his partner. I cover my ears as the shooting begins. A few of the infected head toward the guns. Toward us. The bullets hit a chest, a neck, and the impact knocks them back, but they don’t stop moving. One’s head bursts, and it goes down for good. The man with the ponytail waves us behind him, then moves to the double doors with his cleaver at the ready.

  Before the cops are close, the door gives and the infected pile into the man’s room. Screams roll down the corridor. The cops turn and run back our way. Once they’re through, the double doors wheeze shut, the noise of the hall recedes, and we stand in the sane, quiet world, watching the nightmare approach. An old man slams his mouth against the window. A long brown tooth dislodges and travels down the glass in a frothy river of pink foam. A doctor with glazed eyes hits the glass hard enough to break his nose.

  The ponytailed man turns from the doors. “We have to go.”

  My relief is so great that I stumble more than walk. He leads us along the hall and through a set of windowless double doors to where an elevator waits. It’s bigger and its sides are marked with black streaks—the service elevator. Grace and I back into a corner.

  He spins a key in the panel. The doors close and he looks us over with kind, if anxious, light brown eyes. The tag clipped to his maroon scrub shirt lists his department as Environmental Services and names him as Jorge. “You guys okay?” he asks.

  Now that we’ve left them behind, I’m sure I must have been wrong. There has to be a reasonable explanation—it’s the virus, obviously, but there’s a non-zombie explanation for how someone could walk around with an organ hanging by a thread. I must have imagined those eyes and dull pallor. I was scared out of my mind. Out of reason.

  The older cop, Kearney, pushes a button and the elevator jerks to a halt. He points his gun our way. “Did you get bitten?” His accent is all Brooklyn, and his eyes are narrowed as though he won’t believe us no matter what we say.

  We shake our heads and huddle closer. I didn’t think the weapons were for us, but my world has begun to spin in a new direction in recent minutes. I have rules for unfamiliar places and people. The first is to avoid the unfamiliar, especially people. Wear my bag at all times. Walk down a dark street with my longest key clenched between two fingers. Always look behind me. Pay attention. Don’t get trapped in an elevator with strange men, especially ones who look ready to slaughter me.

  Grace says I have trust issues like it’s a bad thing.

  “What was that?” I try to sound forceful, but it comes out a breathless whisper.

  “Zombies,” Kearney says. His mouth is almost a sneer under his gray mustache.

  I stare at him. So much for a reasonable explanation.

  “What?” Grace whispers.

  “Zom-bies,” Kearney says, extra slowly and completely devoid of patience.

  He reminds me of the cop who once came with Child Protective Services. That guy hadn’t had time to explain to a nine-year-old why she was being taken from her apartment to a waiting car. Like then, I dislike him immediately and feel meek in the presence of authority with a gun. I force myself to straighten my shoulders—I’m no longer nine years old and I haven’t done anything wrong.

  “Stop pointing your gun at us,” I say. Grace squeezes my arm, and I bite my tongue. The old key-between-the-fingers trick makes me feel safer, but I’m certain it wouldn’t be very effective against a bullet.

  “Everyone just chill out,” the baby-faced cop says. He’s in his thirties, with a nameplate that reads Clark. He motions at Kearney, who holsters his gun unenthusiastically.

  “Can someone just explain this?” My voice has taken on an annoyingly desperate note. “Where are we going?”

  Kearney sets the elevator moving again with a jab of his finger. “This has taken up enough of my fucking time.” He turns to Jorge with a snarl. “That was the last time I leave the basement. I could’ve been killed trying to help those people. Wasted bullets trying to get a headshot for no good reason.”

  Judging by his uniform, helping is the better part of his job description. I know Kearney’s type. He likes to wield his power—how little of it he has—but he won’t do anything to earn it.

  “Hey, I didn’t send you up there.” Jorge turns to me. “We’re going to the cafeteria. The street and a lot of the floors are full of infected. We can’t leave until the cops clear them out.”

  “Thank you,” I say to Jorge, although his words don’t fully sink in until Grace whispers, “We can’t leave?”

  “Not yet,” Jorge says. “But we will.”

  The elevator is freezing, but that isn’t why I shiver. I have to ask the question, even if it’s preposterous. I keep my eyes on Jorge. “They’re really dead? The zom—infected?”

  Obviously, the infected attack others, maybe even eat them, but they can’t be zombies. They can’t be dead. That would mean we’ve morphed from reality into a full-scale horror movie. And that’s about as likely as Superman saving us from the zombies.

  Jorge blows out a breath. “That’s what they say.” I can see how reticent he is to admit it, how a little bit of crazy—alive crazy—flashes behind his gaze.

  “And no one in the basement knows that except for the staff,” Kearney says. “So keep your mouths shut.” His gray eyebrows rise in challenge. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who jokes around. Maybe the kind of guy who tortures kittens, but definitely not the class clown.

  The hamster on the wheel in my brain dashes to keep up with this new information. They’re dead and they want to eat us. It’s called a dawning realization for good reason—the prickle of horror starts at my feet and rises until my entire body is flooded with it.

  The elevator thumps to basement level. Jorge holds a finger on the Door Close button. “We don’t want everyone to panic. They’re going to find out, but we want them to find out after the cops get here. So keep it quiet for now. All right?”

  The elevator doors slide open. I step from the recessed area of the elevator bank and into the hall on numb feet. At the other end of the corridor, a nurse bends over one of the gurneys that line the wall near the visitor elevators and a stairwell door. A few people sit on the floor. Every face is washed-out, no matter its previous skin tone.

  “Come sit down in the cafeteria,” Jorge says, and lifts his ID tag. “I’m Jorge, although you probably figured that out.”

  Grace and I mumble our names and stagger through the wide cafeteria entrance down by the gurneys. The large room has been cleared by pushing the tables to the walls of the windowless dining area, leaving an open space where over twenty gurneys sit in rows. The off-white walls are hung with posters promoting New York City services and a few prints done in cheap motel style.

  Nurses tuck patients into their beds. One table holds medical supplies, another food and cups and pitchers of water. A few people in street clothes sit on chairs beside patients, and almost every one of them lifts a cell phone and listens before dropping it to hit redial. A man in a blue jacket with
FEMA emblazoned across the back is bent over a silver briefcase in the corner, a chunky phone pressed to his ear. His expression makes me think he isn’t getting good news, but it does look as if he’s getting something.

  Jorge points to the food service area. “You want a drink?”

  My throat crackles when I swallow. Grace and I nod and make our way into the serving area. A woman with bottle-red hair stares into space behind a glass-fronted counter full of hot food, her fingers curled around a serving spoon held forgotten in mid-air. Refrigerated shelves display pre-packaged salads and sandwiches. Metal racks hold chips and baked goods. Soda and coffee machines and a long row of beverage refrigerators sit against the wall by the registers.

  I reach into one for water and a soda, then wait while Grace, who without a doubt has some sort of stress-relieving tea bag on her person, fills a cup with hot water. We plunk it all on the counter and wait until a small woman in an orange sari appears. She waves away the ten-dollar bill I fish from my jeans pocket and says, “No charge.”

  I sit on the floor against an empty wall in the far corner. Grace drops beside me and pulls her knees to her chest, her skin tinged a green that can’t be attributed to the fluorescent lights. I poke around in her big purse until I find her tea tin, drop a bag in the cup, stick on the lid and set it in her hand.

  She sips with her eyes closed, then snaps out of her daze and pulls out her phone. “I’m calling Logan and my mom.” She dials as unsuccessfully as everyone else and then sets it on her knee. “It won’t go through. Do you think they’re okay?”

  “They’re not at a hospital, so I’m sure they’re okay.”

  But I’m not sure. Based on what I’ve seen so far—zombies and complete mayhem—I’m sure of nothing except things aren’t looking up.

  “But then why can’t I make a call? All the lines shouldn’t be blocked if it’s just the hospital.”

  I want to believe it’s a simple matter of moving the infected away from the hospital doors, but I don’t think it’ll be that easy. I pretend not to be concerned and dial Logan and her mother on my phone. Fast busy signals. I try a text that hangs. Data is useless. That could be the basement, but my phone worked down here early this morning.