Against Zombies Box Set, Vol. 1 | Books 1-4 Read online

  There was a stairway at the next main hallway intersection, and everyone knew that we needed to make our way upstairs as quickly as possible.

  “Rick and I will go back and get a few of those beds to block off the hallways we haven’t cleared yet. Then we can open up the stairs and start up.”

  “Corporal, it’s going to take more than two beds to block this off.”

  “I know, Len, but you two can get the next set. It’ll keep the infected away from what we’ve cleared, so at least we’ll know if they’ve moved. Anything human can just crawl over or under to get around the barricades.”

  I continued to walk to the hospital beds that had been left in the entrance hallway.

  The clock on the wall over the nurse’s desk proclaimed it was only 9:30 in the morning, and I felt like we’d been in battle for hours.

  The need to check in with the two guys outside hit me, so I turned my radio up and pressed the walkie’s talk button. “Everything okay out there, Steve? Joe?”

  “Yep, just watching things out here. Nothing behind us so far, but the crowd out front came back, although not as thick as before. They sure are persistent things,” Steve reported, sounding really bored.

  “All right. We have the ER locked down and are about to open the stairwell to see if we can make it up to the top. Back to radio silence.”

  That was all I needed was to have the radio go off and draw the ZITs to us when we were in trouble.

  The halls had taken on such a quiet peacefulness, that the squeak of the beds’ wheels echoed loudly, sounding weird. We got the beds in place, just as two ZITs showed up.

  I watched them try to move past the beds, but with the brakes on, they weren’t going anywhere. I took aim and put them out of their pain, but I wasn’t sure that they really feel pain anymore. They could be missing body parts and they would keep coming toward you like it didn’t bother them.

  The other two returned quickly, and we went back to retrieve the last two beds when all hell broke loose.

  The last hallway led to the emergency waiting room and had automatic doors that were letting the ZITs waltz right inside.

  Tom and Len were holding them off, but we slid the beds into place to keep a distance from their hands that could pull us into the horde.

  “I’ll be back!” Rick yelled and ran down the hallway by himself.

  He came back pulling a chair behind him and stood on it as soon as he got into the hallway intersection.

  Extra height gave us the advantage of taking these suckers out before they reached us so that we could make some headway.

  “Stay there until we get to the corner, and then follow us into the waiting room. Hopefully, we’ve pulled them toward us and cleaned it out just a little.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rick acknowledge without breaking his concentration on taking out the horde.

  I climbed over the beds and the other two followed me, watching the floor to make sure that none of the bodies reached up to grab us.

  ZITs littered the hall, and we were closer to the corner so that Rick had to stop until we were around it because he didn’t want to hit us.

  The waiting room was full, with about thirty infected, but the doors were wide open, letting more in every minute.

  “Cover me!” I yelled, shooting at those in the doorway so that we could get them closed.

  Hands brushed my cheek as I jumped over several dead bodies and continued to shoot as the inner doors were cleared and those outside were stalled.

  Shots continued as I started to push the dead out of the sliding door’s way. I hit the emergency switch, closing the doors behind me as I faced more coming through. The guys yelling sounded distant as I focused on the goal: get these guys outside and the doors closed.

  My gun had never gotten this much action, even when we’d been overseas with insurgents firing back at us. I groaned when the trigger clicked. My clip was out of bullets.

  Backed against the doors, I fell through them as the guys found the switch on the inside and opened the door. My team came through, shooting and shoving dead bodies out of the way until it was clear and we could shut both doors against the flood of dead outside.

  “Hey, Corporal? Are you all right?” Tom asked anxiously.

  The only thing that came out of my mouth was a hysterical laugh, and the relief felt wonderful.

  “Just give me a minute.” I sat on the floor and put my head between my legs as the reality of what we were doing set in, hard.

  “I know you’re in charge, Corporal, but we can’t have you taking chances like that because we need you to make sure we don’t screw up. Your brains are too important to us for you to let the zombies have them. Got it?” Tom, my second in command, gave me the guilt trip I needed.

  “You’re right, it was stupid. My adrenaline was going, and it seemed natural. I’m sorry.” I looked around at their tired faces.

  “Back to the hallway and the stairs, but first we’re going to eat something and catch our breaths.” I walked over to the vending machine and busted the glass, grabbing chips and a candy bar.

  Rick grinned when he saw what I was doing and used the butt of his gun to knock the lock off the soda machine.

  “This had better not end up in any reports because I don’t want to be court-martialed over a soda machine and a few chips,” I warned them with a smile.

  “We should empty them out and take the stuff back to the supply vehicle,” Rick suggested as he popped the top on a cola.

  “It’ll weigh us down on the way upstairs, but it can be our reward if we make it back down to carry as much as we can with us.”

  “How are we doing on ammo?” I asked, sitting in one of the chairs and digging in the pack for another set of clips that could be easily reached.

  “I’m about halfway out,” Tom chimed in, with Len and Rick echoing his statement.

  “Okay, when we get to the upper floors, we may need to setup something so that Joe can send us some more ammo. I don’t think we can make it back through the horde on what we have, even with the flamethrowers.”

  “Agreed. I’m hoping the first couple of floors have the most infected because there were so many sick that just walked in and hadn’t been seen yet. I think the upper floors is where they relocated all the normal sick people.”

  Everyone gave Len an incredulous look. “Hey, just hear me out. If you were a heart patient, you weren’t going to die from the infection, so they moved all those upstairs because they were the normal sick. But those that had the other kind of symptoms were brought to the ER and infected all the other people. Plus, with the door being open, those ZITs weren’t trying to go upstairs unless they heard something. There were too many here in the waiting room for them to have made it through the door leading to the stairs. Unless there’s another way up besides the stairwells and elevators, the top floors should be less populated.”

  “Wow, Len, that was quite a speech, and I agree with you that there should be less infected, so we’ll use less ammo as well. We aren’t going to clear all the floors, though, just the stairway leading up to the top. If there are people up there, we need to get them back to the truck without getting them killed.” I stood up, signaling that the break was over and it was time to get back to work.

  The stairway wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and thankfully, this hospital didn’t have stairs leading to the basement in this stairwell.

  At each doorway, I peered through the glass in the door to check out the ZIT situation. On most floors, you could see them moving around, but they weren’t all packed together like they were outside the hospital.

  Ten flights, and about twenty ZITs later, we made it to the top floor. I motioned for the guys to take a seat.

  “Rest for just a minute to catch our breaths.”

  “Hey, Corporal, are you implying we’re not in the best of shape?” Len sarcastically accused me.

  “Nope, but we need to be fresh in case there are still people on this floo
r. We’ve been at this for hours and I’m not marine trained, so I know for a fact that I have an exhausted button. Though if you’re feeling froggy then go ahead, but I’m pretty sure that most of us lost our energy hours ago.

  Loud laughter filled the hallway and was quickly followed by thumps on the door we would be going through in just a minute.

  “Looks like our friends have found us. Guess we can let froggy take the lead since he’s just hopping to go.” Tom slapped Len on the back as he got up from the step he’d been sitting on and adjusted his gun, ready to face more ZITs.

  Tom placed his hand on the door handle, ready to open it when we were ready. At my nod, he pulled the door back quickly, letting five ZITs fill the landing.

  As they landed at our feet, a few more approached and were taken care of without any danger.

  Rick leaped over the bodies and started pulling them into the hall so that the door could be closed behind us.

  I peeked around the corner, spotting a few more headed our way.

  The layout on the top floor was different because there was only one door in each hall, but they led to a glassed hall with rooms on the other side for infectious diseases. Ironic, really, that the infected were walking the halls, and it looked like the rooms to keep the disease from us were empty.

  It didn’t take much to clear all the hallways on the entire floor, but that left the enclosed rooms. There were signs that someone had been alive because there were dead bodies lying around, and it wasn’t because we’d killed them, so we proceeded with extra caution.

  Three sets of rooms had a single ZIT, or two, but the fourth glassed room didn’t have any.

  I motioned for quiet because this it seemed like the place where the living humans would be holed up.

  Opening the door, we entered and didn’t see anything on the beds, so Tom hit the button to open the door.

  Two heads popped up from behind the wall, staring at us in amazement.

  “Stop,” I commanded Tom.

  “Are you sick?” I questioned through the glass separating us from the first living people we’d seen in several days.

  “No, we’re both nurses and we were up here resting when the infected attacked.” The willowy blonde stood there in blood covered scrubs.

  Another nurse stood slightly behind her, as if she could protect him from the monsters outside in the halls.

  What a wuss, I thought.

  Tom opened the door the rest of the way at my nod.

  Both grabbed their personal backpacks, but they must not have had an extra change of clothes in them because they smelled horrible. Even surrounded by the rotting dead, these two reeked of weeks of no showers.

  “Is it safe to leave now? Are those things gone?” the female nurse asked anxiously.

  “Not exactly. I’m Corporal Jackson, and we’ll try to get you out to our base camp, but you’re going to have to do some running. Have either one of you ever shot a gun before?” I looked them both over in the dim light from the windows at the end of the hallway.

  “Oh, excuse my manners, I’m Angela, and this is Todd. We and a few others were up here resting when everything went crazy. I’ve never shot a gun before, but it would be much better than this.” She held up the broken metal leg from a chair that was covered in blood and brains.

  Todd cringed when she held it up and moved a few paces back from her, confirming my first thought about his usefulness. Although, he might be a great nurse who just didn’t like the sight of blood.

  “Before it got really bad, I was able to make it to the breakroom on this floor and gather some food, but we’re out of what I found.” Angela brushed a blonde strand out of her face.

  “So, you killed all those bodies we found?” Len asked, eyeing her like she was a piece of candy.

  I would have to deal with him later, but for now, we had one civilian that wouldn’t freak out and one that was a liability.

  Angela nodded nervously. She was probably afraid that we wouldn’t take them with us.

  “This is the only floor that we’ve completely cleared, but we would like to see if there are any more survivors, or if they’ve all become ZITs. If we can clear this out, then the military can use it as a base, and it’s got the added benefit of medical supplies as well.”

  “You won’t be able to do that in one day. This is only one tower of the hospital. There are three more wings, and I’m sure that there are infected all over the place. Once the sick died, there wasn’t any place to put them and they filled the parking garage with those who were coming down with it until it was full.”

  “Aw shit, Corporal. There’s no way we have enough ammo for that kind of stuff. We may not even have enough in the supply truck,” Rick complained, stating the obvious.

  “That could be why there were so many dead outside and why we kept finding more to replace what we killed,” Tom concluded. “We should go ahead and get these guys out and regroup. The base may not want us to continue with what we’re doing.”

  “Is there a way to close off this tower from the main area and other sections?” I looked to Angela, knowing that Todd probably wouldn’t have very much to contribute.

  “There are two roll gates that they close at night when visitor hours are over. The rest are keycard doors or emergency exits that should be shut already,” Angela verified.

  “What about main stairs that lead to each floor? Is the stairwell we came up the only one on each floor?” Tom questioned.

  “Um, there are two stairways on each floor in case of fire. The elevators are what we normally use, but there must be two ways to exit since it’s a hospital,” Todd answered as he stepped carefully around Angela into the hallway, as if he didn’t want to be associated with her.

  “Okay, so this floor is secure for now, and this stairway as well. Are there any clean scrubs up here for you two to take with us to change into once we’re safely back at base?”

  “There’s a linen closet with clean stuff. Honestly, that completely slipped my mind since I knew I would have to go back out there and get bloody all over again. It’s this way.” Angela led the way, still clutching her metal chair leg.

  Even though we’d told her that we’d cleared everything, she still cautiously looked around corners before proceeding. I exchanged a happy glance with Tom. This civilian looked like a good addition to our team.

  Confidently walking to the linen closet, Angela opened the door, banging the leg against the doorframe to call anything out that might have been hiding.

  She flipped the switch on, and light flooded the room because of the backup generators. They would keep working for, and with so many floors having all the lights off, they would last a lot longer.

  A duffle was quickly filled with several sets of scrubs, and being a nurse, Angela was thinking ahead as she added some bandages and a few other medical extras that would certainly be welcome.

  While she loaded up, I motioned for Rick and Len to come around the corner with me, leaving Tom to watch over Todd.

  “I need both of you to keep him behind us as we move out. Len, you watch our backs, and Rick, you watch Todd’s because he’s more likely to run when we’re not looking. If he gets into trouble, do not go after him. Only help if you can prevent it beforehand. He’s not worth dying over because he wouldn’t think twice about pushing you in front of one of these things so he can live. Got it?”

  Yes, ma’am,” they both whispered.

  “Okay, time to head down.” I went back around the corner, just as Angela came out of the room, turning the light out.

  “We’re not going to worry about the extra floors right now. It’s almost lunch time, and by the time we fight our way back to the trucks, it’ll be getting dark, and I don’t want to leave Joe and Steve out there longer than they need to be. So, straight to the bottom, and you two will stay in the stairwell until we give you the all clear.”

  Rick made sure that the door shut behind us as we started the trek down the ten flights.

>   Tom and I opened the door carefully to check and see how the beds we’d left behind were holding up. Evidently, it was working because there were only a few ZITs hanging out in the two hallways that we hadn’t cleared yet.

  I waved Angela out and the others followed.

  “Now which way are the gates? Down these two halls, correct?” I pointed to where the ZITs had been hanging out. “How far down are they, and are there a lot of rooms that could hide infected?”

  “No. From here, this one,” Angela pointed to the main branch, “is only a foot around the corner. The other hallway is longer because it connects to another tower that will let you go over to the children’s hospital.”

  “Is there any special way to pull the gate down or lock it?” Tom asked, making sure that we had all the facts before we made a run for it.

  “No, the security guards would lock it up occasionally, but most of the time they would just put it down to keep people from wandering around. The only time was if there was a lockdown, so just pull it down and that should work.”

  “Stay here.” I pointed to the four others. “Tom and I will take this one.”

  “Got it, Boss.” Both Rick and Len echoed, while Angela nodded her agreement.

  I hoped that they would stay there for the ten minutes we needed to clear the area out.

  A few friendly ZITs were waiting for us and drew the attention of the others in the lobby area. While it would have been nice to have target practice from behind the closed gate, I didn’t want to waste our ammo because we might still need it.

  Everyone was waiting in the hall exactly where we’d left them.

  I didn’t want to go down a long hallway with only two of us, and there shouldn’t be anything coming from behind us unless we’d missed something on our way through.

  More ZITs filled the hall, but with four guns, we made fairly good progress. The gate was just ahead, but the amount of infected milling about seemed to be more than it had been in the main lobby.

  “Angela, stay here and watch Todd,” I called over my shoulder as we continued to shoot our way to the gate.