The
Zombie
Chronicles

Home
About
Blog
Buy
Contact
Donate
Timeline

Finished works:
   Billions
    ---
   Outbreak
    ---
   Undead
     Advantage
    ---
   Found
    ---
   About a Woman
    ---
   Short Stories

Works in Progress:
   TZC2: Discovery

Works on hold:
   Zombie Nation
    ---
   Zombieboy

Found

Chapter 23

Kaylee held Brian's head in her hands for a moment longer before she thought to pull him onto the lift again, which was still slowly inching its way upward. He seemed lighter than she thought he would be and moaned slightly as she set him down on the dirty lift, his arm was bent at a bad angle near his wrist. The wrongness of it made Kaylee shudder and she quickly moved it back into alignment, trying to get it looking like it should were he uninjured. Overall Brian looked like he would live, he said his leg was hurt, and his face had seen far better days, he had a cut on his forehead and had an evil looking bruise on his cheek where Jake had punched him. For a moment Kaylee caught a sweet, alluring sight of color from Brian's body, with dark spots where she imagined his wounds were. Startled she closed her eyes an looked again, nothing, just normal vision.

What was that? she thought, must be from all the smoke and air being burned up. Above her the street doors groaned open, letting fresh, cold air down onto her eager face. A rifle barrel quickly entered the gap, with a laser dot coming to rest on her head.

“Don't shoot me!”, she yelled.

The special forces officer kept his gun trained on her, he looked intimidating in his full body armor, which included a sealed bio-hazard helmet. As he spoke his voice came out mechanically loud, “Keep your hands where I can see them, make no sudden motions. Where is the zombie?”

“Dead. Again. I killed it.”

“Are you sure?”, he seemed to doubt her.

“I put my gun against its head, pulled the trigger and now its dead. Again. I didn't miss, he is laying right there on the floor.” Kaylee gestured behind her to Jake's body.

“Okay good. Was there more than one?”

“No.”, Kaylee answered truthfully, she did not know about Matt.

“Okay, hold on.”, it was apparent he was speaking to someone else on an internal radio, his voice was too muffled for Kaylee to hear all the while his laser sight continued to flicker around Kaylee's face. As the lift finished rising more laser sights joined the first until Kaylee and Brian were lit up like a reddish holiday tree.

“The bio-unit is on the way. Are you injured or just him?”

“I...I am fine, barely a scratch. Brian is hurt, I think its his leg again, and his wrist and head. I don't know how badly, I think he will live.”

“Detective Brian Nelson? And you are his girlfriend, Kaylee?”

Kaylee blushed, “Yeah that's him. And me.”

After that the bio hazard team arrived promptly, both her and Brian were stripped and cleansed in the alley behind the club, the team had brought up high intensity heat blowers, for keeping them warm and drying them off, but Kaylee was still freezing by the time she donned the soft warm robe handed to her by the woman supervising her cleansing. Brian was no where to be seen and the police woman informed her that he had already be brought to Broadlawns medical facility for treatment. Broadlawns had a poor reputation before z-day, it was in a lower class neighborhood and suffered from underfunding, these days it was also the facility used to house people who were infected with the z virus and observing those who might be infected. Kaylee was not too terribly surprised when she was told she, along with every other person in the club, would also be going there for the five day quarantine required by law for anyone exposed to a zombie.

The next five days were an incredible mix of anguish and boredom, anguish because when you were in quarantine you did not get to see anyone unless they were in a closed bio-suit, not even other quarantined people. The hospital had a new building specially built to handle large scale contamination, built like a prison it could hold up to a thousand people in tiny six foot by eight foot rooms, plus they had room for fifty contaminated trauma cells and, if the rumors were true, a sub basement holding an uncounted number of patients who had turned. The building had gone up quickly and was, frankly, pretty shoddy. The plain cement walls were not even painted, let alone covered with any sort of siding and the doors were a cold gray metal with small thick windows set two thirds of the way up. There had been a controversy with the installed cameras, so each room could be monitored remotely, only a tenth of the rooms had such equipment. Cement was cheap and still available, cameras, monitors and other surveillance equipment were hard to come by.

To make the boredom even more repressing was the fact that there were no televisions, books, magazines or anything else to keep the patients entertained. Even internet access was unavailable. All they had was a radio out in the hallway, each day the group of rooms voted on which station to set it to and it played from wake up call until lights out. The bedding was thick and kept in the warmed, which was good as Kaylee would have sworn there was no heat in the place. Normally a possibly contaminated person's clothing was removed and stored in a compartment in the door (accessible only from the outside) and would be given back after the five days of confinement. Kaylee's clothing had definitely been contaminated and had been immediately destroyed when she arrived. After a thorough scrubbing Kaylee had been issued two long hospital gowns and locked into her room, no undies, no shoes, no hat. At least the gowns were made of a fleece, soft and supple, it almost made up for the blankets and brick like pillow.

Adding to the rooms cell-like feel was the combination sink and toilet tucked back into one corner. There was no shower, the medical personal had advised Kaylee to use the provided sponge and sink for a sponge bath if she felt the need to clean up. Meals were served twice a day through a slot halfway up the door, plus there was a light snack pushed in an hour before lights out. Anyone who didn't like the treatment was free to voice their concerns and many did. After the radio was shut off the crying and moaning and complaining would begin. Unknowingly Kayle had set herself up as an object of focused dislike. During the first evening everyone had told their stories and Kaylee's abbreviated version let everyone know that she was the one who had definitely exposed to the contamination. For some reason they all started blaming Kaylee for their blight, as if she made Jake attack her or as if she should have let him kill her to save everyone else the pain and discomfort of the quarantine.

On the second day, Kaylee was feeling pretty low when she had a visitor, actually two visitors, Flo and Walt. They huddled together around the small, thick window and peered in at her, then connected a microphone to the door and, which Kaylee didn't even know was possible, normally the person bringing the food had just spoken through the food slot, their words muffled by the lightweight bio-hazard suit.

“Kaylee? How are you holding up?”, asked Flo.

“Flo? And Walt? Its good to see you! I am doing okay, bored but okay. How is Brian?”

They looked at each other in their suits and Walt responded, “So far so good, he doesn't seem to be infected at all.” His voice was full of apprehension.

“What's wrong?”

Again Walt responded, “Well nothing really, it is just that he is too 'right'. He has healed fast Kaylee, too fast. Let me look at you, eh?”

Kaylee stepped back from the window a bit to give them a better look at her.

“See? You too, when the officers picked you up they said you had a bruise across your face and when you were treated here, they said the same thing, down one side your face to your shoulder, the said they x-rayed your shoulder to see if it was broken.” Kaylee barely remembered that, but nodded 'yes' to Walt's statement.

“So?”

“Kaylee, honey, you looked in the mirror lately?”, asked Flo.

Pointing at the polished stainless steel mirror that was a part of her sink/toilet, Kaylee replied, “The mirror is not too good here, so I couldn't really see much. Why?”

Flo fumbled around in a bio-hazard sack for moment while Walt answered, “Does your face hurt? Or your shoulder?”

Hands rising to her injuries, Kaylee felt them with her fingertips, not feeling any pain she replied, “No, nothing hurts anymore.” Flo pulled a small mirror out of the bag and pressed it against the glass. The thick pane made the view distorted, but Kaylee could see enough to know the bruises on her face were gone. Not faded, not yellowed out, simply not there anymore.

Looking above the mirror into Flo and Walt's eyes she asked, “What does this mean?”

Shaking their head simultaneously Flo spoke first, “No one knows, probably that you will have to stay in quarantine when everyone else leaves.” Flo held up one hand to quell Kaylee's protest, “Hopefully not for much longer, but I don't really know. No one really knows. You've heard rumors of other people who killed the supers right? Well, so have we. Now we get to find out if they are true or not.”

Walt and Flo could not stay for long, there was a limit on the amount of time they could visit and they had to go through decontamination after they left too, lengthy process, however they did bring her things and promised to send her items through the hospital too. The first thing they pulled out were paper copies of the newspaper for the last three days, the paper was not printed in great quantities anymore, mostly it was a digital download to save resources, so this was a great gift, they promised another paper would arrive each day with her first meal. They also brought her a few bags of snacks, a six pack of lemonade, a small bottle of grain alcohol, a toothbrush, a pairs of fuzzy slippers and two sets of clothing from Kaylee's house.

As they left they promised to send more clothing if she was held longer than three more days and that they would visit when they had time. The first thing Kaylee did when they had gone was to get dressed, which is when they found the other gift they had brought her. Inside one of the front pockets on her jeans she found her cell phone, in the other was a brand new battery. Powering the phone on she found that she had an unread text message, turning her back to the window, she opened her phone and read the message, it was simple and concise, directing her on how to open a file that had been stored on the phone's micro flash card memory, but to wait until 'lights out' before she did so. The phones settings had been adjusted too, the sound settings had been changed to 'off' and the back light had been dimmed to practically an unnoticeable level. She left the settings as they were and powered the phone down. So far as she knew she was the only one with a phone in the cell block, everyone's phones had been taken from then when they were put into quarantine.

Heart racing Kaylee pulled on her jeans and as nonchalantly as she could sat on her bed and read the newspapers. By evening she had finished one paper thoroughly enough that she asked the woman dropping off the feed tray if she could give it to another cell if someone wanted it. The woman whispered back that it would be okay and then silently took the paper and pushed it into the slot next to Kaylee's after a brief, whispered conversation with that cell's occupant.

By snack time Kaylee passed on the second paper and after lights out she was rewarded with a couple of quiet 'thank you's from the people she had passed them on to. The after lights out banter was quieter that night, there were a few pointed comments about Kaylee, but one of the people she passed a paper on to quashed it quickly enough. The rest of the banter was along the lines of whining about why they were not let go after three days, as everyone knew if you got bitten the longest you could survive was three days before you succumbed to the infection. That started a debate about the nature of the infect, which resembled a virus, and why it wasn't cured yet. None of the participants knew enough about medicine to know why there were no effective anti-viral medications, and the discussion rapidly turned into one of uneducated opinions. Everyone had to get their two cents in too, anyone who was quiet drew nervous, direct questions as to their well being, not participating was seen as 'you might be getting ill', which would doom this entire section of ten cells to another five day period of quarantine. After and hour of sharing what they had read in the paper and bantering about the nature of the infected the talk slowly died down and Kaylee was allowed to bundle up in her bed. She made sure to pull her plentiful covers up over her head and formed a small, pitch black den where she could read the message that had been left on her phone.

previous... ..home.. next...