The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious

  “Logan should be home by now.” Grace examines her phone as if it holds the answer to everyone’s whereabouts. Which, in reality, it does. “He wasn’t going out tonight.”

  “He knows you’re here, right?” I ask, and Grace nods. “I’m sure he’s home waiting for you. He’s probably trying to call you, too. We’ll go straight to your house when we leave.”

  She taps her fingers on her phone, then winces and rubs at her left elbow.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Nothing. My arm bent weird when I hit the wall.”

  “Let me see.”

  Grace lifts her sleeve. It’s slightly swollen and pink, but she pulls the fabric down with a shrug before I can look close. “Syls, I’m scared. This is crazy. How can they really be…” She dips her head and her fingers dig into her forehead, as though massaging her overwhelmed brain.

  Soda sloshes in my stomach. “I don’t know. But you saw them. They were…” Dead. Zombies. I don’t want to say either of those words. “Not normal.”

  I have a handle on my emotions much of the time—hell, I have them in a straitjacket—but this is too much. I put my arm around her while I think, unsuccessfully, of something comforting to say. The wheel still spins, but the hamster has kicked the bucket.

  “We have to get out of here,” Grace whispers.

  “We’ll get out, Gracie. Even if we have to steal that idiot cop’s gun and blast our way out.”

  Grace sniff-laughs. She may tend toward the sensitive side of the emotional spectrum, but Grace is tough, and she won’t lose her sense of humor without a fight. We watch nurses scurry and people battle with their phones. The FEMA man has hung up his and now stands staring into space. He’s gone monochrome. Skin gray as his hair. Gray as a zombie.

  At least it’s quiet.

  Chapter 3

  Ten minutes later, the quiet is broken by screams from the hall. An ashen nurse runs into the cafeteria. Grace and I jump to our feet and press ourselves to the wall. There’s nowhere to go except the food service area, and you couldn’t pay me enough to go near the hall. I know what to do with zombies—everyone does: Get the head. But I don’t have a weapon unless you count the miniature Swiss army knife in my bag that can barely slice cheese.

  The cops and a security guard rush for the entrance. Gunshots blast far away enough that I retain what’s left of my hearing. Jorge strides for the hall, cleaver in his swinging arm. Things crash and bang. A deep voice yells a command. People shriek.

  “Lock the door!” Kearney calls.

  Grace and I edge to the hall in the silence that follows. Most of the people who were in the hallway now lie on the floor in gallons of blood. They’re dead, but freshly dead. Sprinkled amidst them are paler bodies with black-edged wounds and exposed viscera. All are still but for two who struggle on their backs in slick fluids. Kearney kicks one in the head and jabs his collapsible baton into its eye. Clark does the same with the other, sans the kick.

  The cafeteria entrance is mobbed with nurses, visitors, the patients who are able to get out of bed and a few who might drop at any second. Kearney stands in front of us with his hand on his holster. “Listen up! Anyone tries to open that fucking door again, I swear to Christ I’ll shoot you. Understand?”

  Heads nod. Hands go to mouths. The FEMA man slides through the muck. He gives off the vibe of being in charge and, seeing as how his shirt and jacket are covered in FEMA logos, I guess he is.

  “Some dumbfuck opened the door,” Kearney says to him.

  FEMA frowns at Kearney and then turns to us. “It’s very important that we not—”

  Fresh screams erupt as one of the fresher bodies on the floor, a middle-aged woman, sits up stiffly. She could almost be alive if it weren’t for her twisted neck and the river of blood that spilled from a tear above her collarbone. Clark cracks his baton over her head once, twice, and then a third time, until her skull cracks louder than the impact and hits the floor with a thud. Kearney gives the crowd a thin-lipped grimace.

  People shout. FEMA raises his hands for silence and then points to the stairwell door. “Make sure it’s locked this time.”

  “Don’t have that key,” Jorge says.

  FEMA sighs. “All right, they can’t get in if it’s closed. Someone guard it until we can get tables in front for a barrier. We have to clean this up first.”

  A burly, bearded man in a hospital gown limps to the front of the crowd. “You tell us what’s happening!” he yells in a Russian accent. The blond woman next to him—his wife, maybe—links her arm through his and murmurs in a soft voice.

  FEMA nods to Jorge—now stationed at the stairwell door—and leads us into the cafeteria. “I’m Bart Capra. I work for FEMA. I know you have a lot of questions, and I’m going to answer them. Was about to before…” He gestures to the hall and waits for us to gather.

  There are fewer than ten visitors total, including me and Grace. Three nurses, the cops, security guard, and a few other hospital employees like Jorge and the kitchen staff. Most of the patients have returned to their beds, but all give him their attention. A hum fills my ears as I wait for the inevitable announcement. Grace and I are one step ahead of those who will hear it for the first time.

  Bart clears his throat. “The virus, Bornavirus LX, kills everyone who contracts it. Everyone. One hundred percent mortality. That means if you get it, you die. And you will get it if you’re bitten and, possibly, scratched by someone who’s infected.”

  His eyes move around the room, gauging our reactions. No one has freaked out yet, probably because he hasn’t broken the worst of the news. “But, once they die, their bodies don’t stop the way they should. They’re not…dying. Most of you know the hospital is surrounded. We shut down the visitor elevators by the stairwell after they got onto the patient floors. The police were coming to take care of it.”

  Bart gulps air, which puts a little color in his cheeks. “But they’re not coming. They can’t.”

  A buzz ripples through the crowd. There’s a shout, followed by another, until voices bay like dogs. Bart has to mean they aren’t coming in a timely fashion, not that they’re not coming, period. I rock back on my heels from a surge of wooziness. If I look anything like Grace, then I might be about to faint, and I feel a lot like Grace looks.

  “Please! Let me finish!” Bart yells. The room quiets. “We have to stay put for now. I know you have families—I have a family—but we’re at ground zero here.” He points to the hall. “Now that you’ve seen them, you know what I’m saying is true. It’s like nothing seen before. I can’t explain it except to say that the virus works with a parasite to act on the nervous system. The infected continue to attack after they’re medically dead, and the only way to kill them is to destroy the brain. If you get bitten, you will become one.”

  More shouts—a few the Z word—are quieted by Kearney, who leaps to a chair, hand on his gun.

  “It’s spreading too fast to contain,” Bart says. “They predict many, many casualties in the next few days. They’ve decided the best course of action is to quarantine—close off—the city in order to protect the surrounding areas. As of tonight or tomorrow, they plan to quarantine New York City by blowing up the bridges and tunnels.”

  He’s said the last part in a rush, maybe hoping we’d miss it. There’s an awestruck hush, a moment where we stand in astonishment, contemplating how completely fucked we must be for New York City to be taken out like that.

  Then someone wails. Shouts drown out Bart’s next words. A young nurse with a long brown braid grips a patient’s hand, eyes bulging. Maybe she knew what was happening, but it’s plain she didn’t know what was coming. Grace is frozen, phone clasped in her hand. With the addition of this news, there could be two reasons why our phones don’t work: the outside world is the same as the hospital or they’ve shut off service entirely. Cutting off cell service is nothing if you plan to blow up bridges.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Kearney yells.

  T
hey do. A man in his thirties, with short brown hair and a round face, turns for the hall. Clark blocks his path. I don’t want anyone near that stairwell door, especially not a guy who looks as jumpy as this one.

  “Where’re you going?” Clark asks. His hand sits loosely on his holster, and his light blue eyes are sympathetic but wary.

  The man slouches, defeated before he began. “I have to get home. I have kids. I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I need to get home. I can’t—”

  Bart moves forward to rest a hand on the man’s shoulder. “What’s your name?”

  “Craig. My name’s Craig. I have to—”

  “We can’t leave, but we can warn our families.” Bart holds Craig’s gaze but speaks loud enough for everyone to hear. “Everyone can use my phone. It works on a different system from your cell phones, so you have a better chance of getting through. Craig is going to go first, all right? Let’s make a line.”

  Bart steers him to the silver laptop and hands him his phone. Once Craig dials, Bart approaches those of us who are on our feet. “I need your help. The hall has to be cleaned before someone gets infected. Can anyone here help with that? I promise you’ll get a turn with the phone.”

  Grace and I raise our hands, as do a middle-aged couple, both of whom wear Giants jerseys. An old man wearing a fedora does as well, but he barely looks able to hold on to his cane. Grace brings her arm down and rubs at her other elbow.

  “Let me see,” I say.

  She shows me an elbow that’s turned lavender and swelled enough to lose its shape. “It’s fine.”

  “Yeah, that looks totally normal. Too bad we’re nowhere near a medical professional who could look at it.”

  “I think everyone’s a little busy right now.”

  I cross my arms. “Fine, but you can’t help. Go get in line.”

  “I should—”

  “Call Logan and your parents. And your brother. That’s the only thing you should do, okay?”

  She gives me the glimmer of a grateful smile and leaves to take a spot by Bart’s phone. The last thing on Earth I want to do is walk into the hall. I can still smell it, even if I can’t see it. I pull a pair of latex gloves from the box a nurse offers. The first dead body I ever touched was my mother’s, and now, not much later, I pull limp arms and dead weight along the smooth tile. I lift them onto gurneys and deposit them behind thick steel doors at the far end of the hall. The corridor beyond leads to the morgue, but we can go no farther—the morgue has zombies. Shadows move in the light that pours from a window set into a door down the way.

  The chill of the zombies’ skin makes it through the latex. It gives just a bit under my fingers, like partially cooked steak, and makes my skin crawl. I grab the arms of a heavyset woman and pull with no success until Jorge takes one arm. We drag her the whole way and unceremoniously dump her beside another body. By the time we’re done, my mouth is pasty and my head throbs. We shove the gurneys through and Jorge locks the doors, then we head back to stand in the liquid of the bodies we moved.

  The stairwell door rattles. A face with chewed-off lips peers through the oblong window. The tattered cheek of another presses to the glass, teeth gnashing and one eye protruding from its socket. It’s unbelievable. All of it. The virus and the bombs and the dead not dying.

  I know this disbelief I feel, the disbelief on the others’ faces, is a survival mechanism. You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed. But disbelief is insubstantial. The things at the door are real as can be, made of flesh and bone and teeth. All I have to do is believe in zombies.

  I’d be an idiot not to when they’re banging at the door.

  “We should probably start on this.” Jorge points to the floor and the murals of splatter on the walls. His shoe makes a sucking sound as he walks to the edge of the mess. “Be right back.”

  He returns with a janitorial cart, an extra mop, spray bottles of industrial disinfectant and giant rolls of paper towels. It takes a while, and approximately ten changes of the water in the mop bucket, but between us and the Giants jerseys couple, the floor is now spotless and the cream walls gleam but for a possible pinkish hue. We’ve filled two garbage bags with things I don’t want to think about ever again.

  Jorge tosses a mop in the bucket. “I’ve cleaned up a lot of crazy shit in this place, but that…” He puffs his cheeks, head moving side to side. “Thanks for helping out.”

  “What else would I do?”

  “Call your family?”

  I look to the line in the cafeteria. A nurse rocks from foot to foot. An older Asian man in a hospital gown stares straight ahead, hand to his chest. I can just make out the top of a raw pink incision on his sternum. No one shoves anyone else out of the way. Order has been established. Or maybe fear reigns.

  I shrug in answer. The only people to call are Grace and her family, and she’s on it.

  Jorge says quietly, “Me neither.”

  He removes his latex gloves and squeezes my shoulder. I don’t like people in my bubble, am never sure how to react, but I smile to cover my unease. After we’ve cleaned our shoes, we push heavy tables into the hall to form a barrier from the door to the wall. Even if they manage to get the knob turned and the door swings into the stairwell, they won’t get past.

  I surgeon-scrub my arms in the bathroom until my skin is rosy. My reflection in the mirror is round eyes and stunned expression. I stare at the new version of me but can’t get her face to register any other emotion, so I leave.

  Grace sits with our stuff, right hand cupping her elbow. I sink down beside her. “Did you get them?”

  “Voicemail,” is all she says.

  “How about Josh?” Josh is her older brother by seven years, who lives in Atlanta. She shakes her head, and I sigh. “They might get the messages.”

  Fat tears hang on her eyelashes before they make the move to her cheeks. She doesn’t bother to brush them away. I wish Grace wasn’t apart from her family, but I can’t help but be glad I’m not alone. It figures that doing the right thing by my mother would be what puts us at ground zero in the middle of an already hopeless situation. Good old Mom, still ruining lives even after death.

  A nurse crouches beside us. She tugs at the short brown hair that falls to just below her ears, framing an attractive heart-shaped face with small nose and gold-flecked brown eyes. Close up, the lines around her eyes suggest she could be in her early fifties, but she has a youthful appearance.

  “You girls okay?” she asks in a voice tinged with a soft Spanish accent. We nod. “Did you use the phone?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “I’m Maria.”

  We introduce ourselves and I point to Grace. “Can you look at her arm? She hurt it upstairs.”

  Grace shakes her head. “I’m sure she has better things to do than—”

  “Let me take a look,” Maria says. Grace holds out her arm while Maria gently prods and asks questions. “You might have sprained it. We don’t have a doctor down here, or an MRI machine to see if you tore a ligament, so we’ll put it in a sling and ice it.”

  Maria leaves and returns bearing a bag of ice, ibuprofen and a piece of bedsheet. “We did the best we could. It’s not fashionable, but it’ll work.” She ties the fabric around Grace’s neck and then nestles the ice inside in a competent but tender manner. “Keep that on there about fifteen minutes. Be sure to come see me if it feels worse, but I’ll check on you later.”

  “Thank you,” Grace says. She uses her good hand to move her phone to her leg where she can keep an eye on it. “Just in case my husband calls back.”

  “Did you get through on Bart’s phone?” Maria asks.

  Grace shakes her head. “I left messages.”

  Maria’s eyes skip b
etween us. “I told my girls we were safe here. Don’t worry too much. We’ll be okay.”

  She attempts a smile, but it’s gone before she stands. I can’t help but think she’s trying to convince herself.

  Chapter 4

  I wake to soft moaning and sit up, head swiveling until I confirm nothing is coming to eat me. It should probably become a habit. At least for the next thirty days, which is how long the zombies are expected to live, according to the last phone call Bart received. The news that an end is in sight calmed some people down, including me and Grace. Others, like Craig, grew more frantic when it became apparent we’re on lockdown for a month, or for as long as the exits are blocked.

  They dimmed the lights so we could rest, and most people still sleep. My phone says three in the morning, and I turn it off after I’ve checked the time in order to conserve the battery—I forgot my charging cable in my haste to leave my mother’s room. I would like to resume unconsciousness for a few more hours, but I know from a lifetime of experience this is all the sleep I’m getting.

  I make my way to the hall bathroom. The toilets still work, thankfully, and I use the travel toothbrush I keep in my bag. Back in the cafeteria, Maria and the young nurse with the braid stand beside a gurney. The moans I heard must have come from the security guard, who lies under the sheet, face flushed and chest hitching slightly. Maria sticks a syringe into a bottle, then a different bottle and another, taking up a bit of each. She deftly turns the guard’s head and places her fingers at the base of his skull.

  “Right here,” Maria says. The needle slides into his hairline, the contents injected with a push of her thumb. She picks up his hand and uses her stethoscope to listen to his chest, then gently sets his hand down and nods at the young nurse. “Keep watching but don’t worry.”