Pathogen - Chapter 20

Stepping into the glare of the flashlight, Cliff aimed the shotgun at the strange woman. “Drop the weapon!” he barked in an intimidating shout that surprised even himself.

Startled, the woman stepped back from the doorway. She released her grip on the axe and it clattered to the ground. Grace stepped around Cliff to shine the light on her, and she covered her eyes against the dazzling brightness.

The woman had clearly seen better days. Her pinstriped blouse and dark pleated pants were stained with dirt and blood, a testament of the ordeal she’d been forced through. She had tied her blonde hair back in a tight ponytail, yet still loose hairs were hanging about her face in disarray. Exhaustion had wreaked havoc on her features and although the woman was only in her late twenties, she appeared much older than that.

“S-sorry,” she stammered as she regarded the axe on the floor with downcast eyes, “I wasn’t expecting company.”

“Yeah, neither were we,” Cliff explained, but kept his weapon trained on her.

Grace pushed the barrel of the shotgun down to the floor. “Dude, give it a rest,” she admonished, “Look at her, the last thing she needs is to get shot.”

Although he was no longer aiming at her, Cliff still stared at the woman intently. “Why didn’t you show yourself when we came in? Were you lying in wait for us?” he interrogated her.

“What?” she asked incredulously, “I was scared of you. I locked all the doors in case the infected showed up, and then next thing I know I hear a gunshot and a bunch of strange people break in. I thought you might want to hurt me, so I hid in here.” The woman rubbed her arm and asked meekly, “You aren’t going to hurt me, are you?”

Cliff looked away in embarrassment, but Grace spoke up to reassure the woman. “We’re not here to hurt anybody,” she soothed the distraught woman, “We’re just hiding from the zombies out here, same as you.”

“Zombies?” the woman asked, “Is that what you guys call them?”

Aaron spoke up from the floor, still lounging there with Scruffy, “If it looks like a zombie, eats like a zombie, and dies like a zombie, then yeah, we call them zombies.”

“Interesting,” the woman mused, “At the hospital they kept just calling them ‘infected.’ Of course, the name had already stuck by the time the dead ones started eating the living ones.”

“You’re from the hospital?” Cliff asked, “What are you, a nurse or something?”

“Hardly,” the woman scoffed, “I’m the system administrator. My name’s Rita.”

“Well it’s very nice to meet you, Rita,” Grace began to introduce themselves, “I’m Grace, the dude on the floor is Aaron, and the man who almost shot you is Cliff.”

“Sorry for that,” Cliff apologised sheepishly, “I just saw the axe, and this place is pretty spooky, right?”

“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you shot me,” Rita remarked, “Coming across somebody who looks like an axe murderer in an abandoned house? I’d have shot me too. This whole place has a bad horror movie vibe.”

“Right? That’s what I’m saying,” Aaron agreed.

“Let’s not talk about horror movies,” Cliff interrupted, “You said you were at the hospital? Is that where you were when this whole thing went down?”

“That’s right,” Rita nodded with a shiver, “But I thought you didn’t want to talk about horror movies.”

“Let’s hear your story,” Grace insisted, “We’ve got to do something to pass the time, right?”

“Well, okay,” Rita relented as she stepped back into the bedroom to sit on the edge of the bed, “Might as well make yourselves comfortable though, it’s a long story.”

Grace and Cliff stepped into the room and leaned against the walls in the corner. Aaron chose to sit with Scruffy still, seeing as how he could hear perfectly fine from where he was. Once everyone had settled, Rita launched into her story.

“Like I told you, I’m the system administrator for the hospital. Whenever somebody loses their password, or their computers aren’t working with the network correctly, I’m the person who has to fix it. There’s hundreds of computers in the building, so I should have a whole team of people working for me. But the budget hardly has enough to pay my own salary, so that’s out of the question. So usually I end up working late well past my shift, which is what happened today.

“Our computers are all connected together into a single network, but they also share an intranet with other hospitals across the country. The director of the hospital was having a problem sending an email through the intranet. They were trying to get ahold of another director in the capital, but the email just wouldn’t send.”

Grace interrupted, “Why didn’t you just have him send it through the regular internet instead of the intranet?”

Rita smiled wryly, “You think I didn’t tell her that? Of course it’d work. Of course the whole internet isn’t going to go down. But of course, that wasn’t good enough for her. She told me that the intranet should work, so therefore it must work, and that I had to get it working. Naturally, she waited until the end of the day to tell me, so instead of getting to go home and relax, I was stuck cleaning up someone else’s mess.

“It was the end of the day here, but the hospital we were trying to reach was in a different timezone. So I tried to call up their IT department, but I never got an answer. I sent them an email, not through the intranet, and set about trying to fix it myself. Now in addition to the hundreds of computers I had to manage alone, now I had to fix another network by myself.”

Cliff spoke up with a question, “They never picked up the phone? Did they answer the email?”

“I don’t know,” Rita shook her head, “I left my phone at my desk, and I’ve been a bit too distracted to check my email.”

“What if the reason they didn’t answer was because they got slammed with zombies too?” Cliff chewed the inside of his cheek as he mulled it over, “We have no idea how widespread this thing is. Could it be in the capital already?”

“There’s no sense worrying about it,” Grace cut in, “If we can’t find out for sure, then we might as well not know about it.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Cliff looked back up to Rita, “Sorry to interrupt. Tell your story.”

“Okay, so as I was saying,” Rita continued her tale, “Our network couldn’t communicate with their network. I tried pinging individual computers, but it was like the whole hospital had just gone dark. There’s a few different things that could cause that, but I never got a chance to find out.

“I was still busy working away when a bunch of cops showed up. They told me they were placing me and the entire hospital on a mandatory quarantine. I was pissed, and told them as much. I told them that I hadn’t even been into a room with a patient all day, but they said it didn’t matter. They weren’t too happy either, I guess, since they had to stay behind too. Whatever our feelings were, they escorted me downstairs near the emergency room where everyone was being held.

“All day, the hospital had been taking in people with the flu. Only, now I guess I realise it wasn’t actually the flu. Anyhow, the hospital had just started giving out the flu shots, but the doctors were complaining about how late the vaccine had arrived. They said that by this point, a lot of people would already have the flu. So it didn’t really come as a surprise when all these people showed up with flu like symptoms. It did come as a surprise when it was half the town in the hospital.

“Soon the doctors were getting pretty overwhelmed. Not only was the sheer volume of patients pretty insane, but the symptoms were setting on much faster than the flu. People were fading fast, and everyone wanted to leave. But now the police had shown up, and they told everyone they had to stay put.

“Naturally, there was some unrest because of the crowding and the quarantine, but that gave way to panic when people started dying. The flu patients didn’t make it, but nobody could have expected that they’d start eating people. In a few moments, the scene turned to utter chaos. Everyone was screaming, everyone wanted out. The cops said they’d use force if we tried to leave, but the crowd just trampled them. I think one of them died, but I was swept up in the rush and couldn’t tell.

“Not everybody made it out. Some of them died in the trample, and others were bit by the sick people they’d brought in. However it happened, there were fewer of us who made it out than had made it to the hospital.

“Now that we were out on the street, I realised I didn’t know where to go. I tried to go back inside to get my things, I guess I was after my car keys, but a man stopped me. He told me it was too dangerous to go in there. He said he’d seen the movies before and knew what this was, and he’d be able to keep me safe.

“Well, he convinced a few of us to come with him, but it wasn’t long before we started to doubt his ability to keep us safe. We wandered through town on foot, but the infected kept herding us. We lost so m

“I thought I was done for. You know, there was nobody left, I was the last person alive, and I was totally out of my element. I work with computers for crying out loud, I’m not cut out for survivalism. But next thing I know, this dog here jumps out and starts barking at me.

any to them, until eventually it was just me and him. We walked clear across town, those things always just right behind us, until we got to the suburbs.

“He thought we had some safe distance between us and them, so he let his guard down. We found an abandoned police car in the middle of the street, and because we hadn’t had a chance to find any weapons, he set to searching it. Well, he didn’t find anything inside, but next thing I know there’s one of the infected, and she’s eating him.”

Grace and Cliff exchanged a guilty look at the mention of the police car. Deciding to say nothing, they urged Rita to continue.

“I thought I was done for then. I’m not cut out for survivalism, I work with computers for crying out loud. But then all of a sudden, this dog here jumps out and starts barking at me. At first I just kind of ignored him, but then he warned me about some more infected I was about to run into. Suddenly I realised he was trying to lead me out of here, and that I should be following this dog out of here.”

“So that’s where you found Scruffy at,” Aaron called out from the hallway. Scruffy’s ears perked up at the mention of his name.

“You know him?” Rita asked.

“Yeah, he’s our friend Steve’s dog,” Aaron explained.

“Small world, huh? Where’s your friend Steve at?” Rita asked.

An uncomfortable silence followed, and Rita realised she shouldn’t have asked. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“It’s okay,” Cliff muttered and changed the subject, “So what happened next?”

“There’s not much to say,” Rita sighed, “The dog and I ran for what seemed like hours. The fog was so thick, but I guess he could smell the infected or something. I didn’t have a plan, but I trusted that the dog wasn’t going to lead me into a trap. Before long, we made it down to the beach, and we actually ran past the breakwater before I realised that this place was probably safe from the infected.

“It took some convincing to get him to come, but the dog and I crossed the breakwater. There was a ladder hanging from the cliff, and it was a real struggle getting the dog up there. But eventually we were at the top. I pulled in the ladder because I didn’t know if the infected knew how to climb it. Then I found this axe in the stump outside, and walked inside. I locked all the doors and windows behind me, then hid up here. About an hour later, you guys showed up.”

“I guess we’re all up to speed,” Aaron spoke from the hallway, “So now that we’re all safe here, what do we do?”

Everyone shrugged. Nobody knew how long it would be until help arrived. In the meantime, all they could do was wait and hope for the best.