The zombies, on the fifth attack against the glass, used their heads along with their forearms, bloodying themselves in their relentless obsession to break through. The glass shattered but held at first, a spider's web of crackling lines now masking the horror somewhat, snapping Kendra and the others out of their awe-inspired helplessness.
"Call for help! Mark, get on the phone!" she shouted.
"Who do I call? Orderlies won't touch these guys."
Tom shouted from his phone, "It's happening on every floor, every isolation ward!"
"What?"
"Every comatose patient is walking out of the hospital."
The glass was hit again and again and it began to crumble. Some men and women who tried to subdue the flood of zombies were grabbed and lifted and carried before the army. Mark and Tom uselessly threw hefty notebooks and chairs at the front of the line, trying to slow their progress as they ushered everyone back. Mark grabbed Dr. Cline, pushing her through the door.
Once everyone who was able had gotten beyond the door, it was locked behind them, but suddenly the door was being rammed. The zombies attacked it without letup again and again and again.
"I've got to call Stroud," Kendra called out, racing back into her lab, but there she saw that some of the zombies had opted for a second way out of the isolation ward, having battered through a wall, using the bodies of some of her dead staff as their battering rams. She raced from here, and now the zombies were coming through the locked door of the monitoring room, the bodies of other blood-soaked men and women used as battering rams dropped before them and trampled underfoot.
The zombies made for the corridors, the stairwells, the exits, and before them ran the staff.
Kendra found nurses cringing behind a desk on the floor below who told her they'd telephoned police, but that the same thing was happening all over New York, at every hospital and clinic that had taken in victims of the plague, that they were all moving and killing as they went.
From the windows they saw a flood of zombies amassing in the streets going blindly toward some unknown destination. "Like an army of mindless insects," said one of the nurses from a window on the twenty-ninth floor.
"Where are they going?" asked another.
Then it dawned on Kendra exactly where the zombies were going. Their goal had to be the pit at the Gordon Construction site. Gordon meant to bulldoze over the pit, having changed the design of his massive tower, but something in the pit had other plans.
She raced for the phone and dialed Stroud at the Museum of Antiquities. It seemed to ring forever before Wisnewski answered it, and when she pleaded for Stroud, he told her that Abe was just getting some much-needed sleep.
"Wake him, dammit! This is important, Doctor."
"What's happened?"
"Please, I must speak to Stroud."
It seemed another eternity before Stroud got on the phone. She almost screamed. "There's something terribly wrong going on out here, Stroud!"
"What's wrong?"
"Our comatose patients ... all got up--" Her voice was out of control.
"Then your antidote is working!"
"No! No, it isn't! They're--they've attacked us."
"Attacked?"
"En masse! They've become like--like zombies, Stroud, and it's happening all over the city, and--"
"Easy, easy--"
"--and they're all heading for the pit, toward Gordon's damned hole!"
"Christ, it's happening."
"What?" She was suddenly confused. "You expected this?"
"No, not so soon, anyway. This thing must be incredibly powerful."
"Gordon's people must be warned, and Nathan's--"
"Gordon's people?"
"Don't you see, it's got to do with Gordon's people back at the construction site."
"But we had an agreement with the mayor that--"
"All bets are off. You've been so secluded at the museum that you don't know what's going on. Gordon's calling the shots now."
"Dammit! The fool has precipitated this. Damn him!"
"Gordon's planning to bulldoze the site and--"
"Seal it off? Dammit, don't those fools know that this thing is not in the pit any longer, that it's among us! In us! If we seal the site off, we seal our own fates. Where is Nathan in all this?"
"I don't know ... Gordon's overseeing the work."
"Where are you?"
"I'm at the hospital! I was on my way to see you when--"
"Are you all right?"
"--all right? My patients are walking out on me like so many zombies, Abe!"
"But you're physically all right?"
"Yes, yes, but--"
"Good, then do what I ask."
"Whatever you say."
"That concoction you put together for Leonard. It may be our only hope at this point. Is there any way to transport as much of it as possible to the construction site?"
"Yes, but ... but why?"
"We may have to use it, Kendra."
"Use it? On the zombies?"
"It may be our only hope. Those zombies as you call them are bent on destroying us, Kendra. Don't ask me how I know this, there isn't time. Just trust me."
"You'll need some way to inject the antidote--or should we now call it poison?"
"For any of those who come to the pit, consider it poison, I'm afraid. And yes, anything you can do about injecting literally hundreds ... please bring your tools and your ideas. I'll meet you at the site."
Kendra got on the P.A. system and gathered what remained of her staff and debriefed them as quickly as possible. She asked for volunteers to go with her to the Gordon Construction site carrying the necessary materials Stroud had requested. Only Mark and Tom volunteered.
"All right," she said, "we'll need all the protective gear we can gather up. We'll need all the syringes and dart guns we can find, and we'll need every ounce of the ... the so-called antidote. Everyone else remaining behind, I want you to go into producing more of this poison. It may be the only weapon we have against those zombies. And don't roll your eyes at me. I know these zombies were people once, but at the moment, they will kill you in order to see their ends met. Now, do as I say."
Very soon after this Tom Logan and Mark Williams had loaded a medical van in the parking lot with all the materials at their disposal, and they were now racing for the Gordon site and the fearful pit where they would link up with Abraham Stroud.
Abraham Stroud tried desperately to stop the mammoth machines at Gordon Construction from moving in to seal off the mysterious Etruscan ship. But police, ordered to control the strange, growing crowd of zombies and madmen that had encircled the construction site, dragged Stroud away from the dozers and to James Nathan. Not even the C.P. was listening to any more rhetoric. He shouted at Stroud, "It's time we took action!"
"Blindly? Stupidly?"
"Any damned way we can get it!" His anger and his words were a mirroring of the feelings of almost all of the citizens of New York City. Thus far, the evil was dividing them, one against the other, as sharply as a meat cleaver. Stroud continued to argue. "But we're going to need access to the damned pit, to the ship! Nathan! We're close!"
"Not close enough," came a sharp-edged voice beyond Nathan. It was one of the construction guys, the boss from the look of the man. He pointed skyward. "Here comes Sir Arthur now."
It was a helicopter with the markings and blue and white colors of Gordon's company. The foreman said, "He's going to be pissed off it hasn't been done."
"I don't give one shit about your boss's feelings, McMasters!" shouted James Nathan, making certain everyone within earshot understood that he was acting on his own here, and not as Gordon's puppet.
Stroud tried again to reason with Nathan. "We're going to have to go back inside ... to face this thing," he said.