A voice off-camera said, “Video record of patient Doctor Marcus Vess. The patient is exhibiting signs of rage and paranoia. Treatment will involve…” The voice stopped as Vess grabbed the arm of a nurse and bit into her flesh. She screamed, trying to pull away. Everyone in the room moved forward to restrain Vess, but he released the nurse and turned his attention to one of the doctors, grabbing the man’s lapels to pull him down and clamp his mouth around his neck.
The man behind the camera must have rushed in to help, knocking the camera to the floor as he moved past it. The picture fell from the scene on bed and showed only the tiled floor while screams and shouts could be heard in the room.
Doctor Colbert turned off the video. “I’m sure you can guess the rest. The virus began to spread around the building. We tried to contain it, but every time we thought we had it under control, we were wrong. At the same time, we began receiving reports of infected persons in the general population outside the building, in the local community. A team was dispatched to Vess’s house. Some of his neighbors were missing. He had done a good job of spreading the virus before coming back to us.”
“So he was patient zero,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes, he is.”
“Is?” Sam asked. “Don’t tell me that fucker is still alive.”
She looked at him and nodded. “He’s still alive,” she said. “I think he’s in the air vents.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE WALKIE-TALKIE CRACKLED. Tanya said, “Alex, we have a problem.”
I pressed the button. “What is it?”
“About two dozen zombies have just wandered onto your floor from the stairs. They’re hanging around by the elevators. Some of them are coming down the corridor outside the offices.”
“We’re going to get trapped in here,” I told the others. “They could be wandering around out there for days. That’s time we don’t have.”
“Let’s go kick some ass,” Sam said.
I contacted Tanya again. “We need a clear escape route off this floor.”
“Hold on, we’ll check the cameras.” The walkie-talkie went quiet for a minute. I could hear shuffling sounds beyond the door.
I turned the walkie-talkie’s volume down. No need to advertise our presence in here.
“It doesn’t look good,” Tanya said. “There are nasties by the elevator and on the stairs. I can’t see a way off that floor that doesn’t involve running into a lot of zombies.”
Johnny’s voice cut in. “Wait a minute. Alex, there’s another set of stairs on the other side of the building. I think it’s an emergency exit.” I heard papers being moved as he checked the maps. “Yeah, it runs all the way down to the first floor.”
“Are there any cameras in there?” I asked. “I’d like to know what’s there before we go running into it.”
“No cameras,” Johnny said.
While the conversation was going on, Jax had opened up her map and laid it on Vess’s desk. She ran her finger along the corridors and rooms until she found the emergency stairs that Johnny was talking about. “We need to get past the elevators and into this corridor here,” she said, tracing her finger along the route we were going to have to take.
“We’re going to have to fight our way through,” I said. “We don’t have a choice.” I looked at Doctor Colbert. “You’re going to need a weapon.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t stay here. There are zombies right outside that door.”
As if to prove my point, a thud sounded against the wood. They had heard us.
“It was always just a matter of time,” Colbert said. “Everyone else has been killed. I was just waiting for my turn.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “We can escape.”
Another thud shook the door.
“Escape to where?” she asked. “I know what’s happened to the world beyond these walls. It’s no better than in here. Everyone I’ve ever known is dead. Even if we get past those monsters outside the door, there’s a much worse monster hunting us down. Vess will catch us sooner or later.”
“I’m not leaving you here,” I said, grabbing her arm and pulling her to her feet. I couldn’t open that door knowing that the zombies would come into the office and find Doctor Colbert. Every fiber of my being told me that I had to deny those creatures the life of a human being, even if that person wanted to die. The zombie apocalypse was a war of attrition; for every human we lost, they gained another monster. I wouldn’t let Lisa Colbert become one of them.
I grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “If you won’t fight, then at least run.”
She nodded, seemingly surprised by my determination to keep her alive.
“Are we ready, man?” Sam asked. He held the MP5 steady, muzzle pointed at the closed door.
The zombies began to pound on the door with their fists.
“How much ammo do you have left?” I asked Sam.
“It’s getting low. But we need to shoot our way out of here.”
I nodded.
Jax opened the door. The zombies in the corridor fought to come inside, to taste our flesh.
The sound of the MP5 was loud in the small office but not as deafening as it had been in the elevator. As Sam delivered headshot after headshot, the nasties dropped to the floor and lay there in rotting heaps of mottled blue flesh.
Sam ran forward, stepped over the carcasses, and began firing down the corridor toward the elevators. We followed, Doctor Colbert allowing me to drag her along by the hand.
At the far end of the corridor, a horde of nasties began shambling in our direction. Sam shot three of them, and they fell quickly as their brains were destroyed, but then the MP5 made an empty clicking noise. “Fuck!” Sam shouted.
“We need to turn right by the elevators,” Jax said as we moved forward.
I had to let go of Colbert’s hand as we got near the nasties so that I could use both hands to wield the bat. To my relief, she stayed close behind me. I had been afraid that she might just stand where she was, refusing to move, but she seemed to have decided to live a little longer.
I swung the bat at the head of the closest zombie, a man in a white lab coat whose face was hanging off his skull loosely, chewed and torn. His head caved in with a sickening crack as the bat smashed through bone and brain.
Jax and Sam were likewise swinging their bats, clearing a path past the nasties.
A blonde woman in a black blouse and skirt lunged at me, teeth bared. I pushed her back with the tip of the bat before swinging it into her head as hard as I could. Her skull cracked open, spilling liquid and brains as she fell to the floor.
“Oh, my God, that was Linda,” Colbert said, her hand flying to her mouth and her eyes wide.
We fought our way around the corner and into the corridor that led away from the elevators to the part of the building where we would find the emergency stairs.
The corridor was clear. We ran.
The zombies followed at their deathly pace, a collective moan rising from them as if they were pleading with us to come back and let them eat us.
We reached a closed, locked, metal and glass door. Jax used her access card to open it and we slipped through. The door closed behind us. The zombies pressed themselves against the glass in vain, watching us with their hateful yellow eyes as we walked away.
I noticed a camera on the wall at the end of the corridor. “Can you see where we are?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.
Johnny answered. “Yeah, it looks clear. The door to the stairs should be on your left.”
We found it. The door was a regular door with a sign that showed a stickman going down a flight of stairs beneath the words EMERGENCY EXIT.