Hank and Juan's Story

Back at the maternity ward Juan worked with the men to clean up the hallway, paying particular care to get the window cleaned off, it just looked filthy to him and long after he had wiped it clean he kept staring at it, as if he expected it to be grimy again. One of the Doctors approached him and asked if he was alright.

“Oh si, yes. I am fine. How are the women and babies doing?”

“They are good Juan. Look, the group has a few questions about you, about the guys you are with, who sent you and all and about YOU, you. I mean, we all knew about the zombie Rafael, you didn’t though, he, well he killed people right in front of us, usually by beating them to death then biting through their throats, this was over before the group got so small, in the west wing of the building before they smoked the chaplain out.”

“Chaplain? Tell me about that.”

“In a minute okay? You first, then I will go.”

Juan proceeded to tell the doctor, Sam McAfee, about what he and Hank had been through since the whole mess had started. He summarized it quickly and was done in about five minutes. He kept thinking he was leaving something out, after all on the rooftop it had taken Hank most of two hours to get through the story when telling Kevin. Hank was more of a story teller anyway, Juan guessed. He ended with Mary getting bitten downstairs and then looked to Sam, saying, “Okay now you, what happened to the chaplain?”

“Well it was weird, we have a chapel here, St Joseph’s Chapel, and we have a full time chaplain, and one part timer too, though he was not here two days ago when all this happened. The chaplain on duty was trained Catholic, he moved over to become our private chaplain about 2 years ago. His name was Brian Donahue, he was a priest too, but working here with us became his calling. I knew him pretty well and he was going to go back to the clergy in another few years, but right now he felt the call of the service here. He made damn good money too, but always kept his wages to what he would have earned had he been the head of a parish somewhere. That took a lot of balls too, I mean this is not exactly low end hospital and his wages had to be five or six times what he would have earned elsewhere. Anyway he was very devout, gave probably half of his earnings back to us in the form of private donations and the rest of it went to his local church. I remember the fuss about that, let me tell you! He had his paycheck set up to take the percentage out and have it deposited directly into his choice of charities and when the local administrators found out how much he was giving away, man you should have heard them, you’d think he was giving away their money!”, Sam got a faraway look in his eyes.

“So what happened to him?”, prompted Juan, who was Catholic himself.

“Well I only have the story second hand, anyone who was there and saw anything is dead now. I think John, that kid who went with Jack, was there, but he didn’t see anything, he was in the west wing, I think. Anyway I heard from one of the other guys who made it over here after….well after they killed Donahue, what had happened.

He said that he was standing in the west hallway, looking towards the chapel and saw their leader, never knew his name, but saw him calling out to Donahue through the doors of the chapel. Donahue said he would not come out and if they felt they could overcome God’s Will they could come in and get him. That is just it though, the zombies, they wouldn’t go into the chapel. Even the stupid ones that their leader tried to force through. It was kind of a stand off, only Donahue was not exactly doing anything to the zoms except praying at them and trying to compel them to go to their final rest, resist Satan and a bunch of other things. They guy who told me this said sometimes it worked.”

Sam let that hang out there a minute before continuing, “Finally the leader he had had enough, the father was in there with about 30 patients and their families and while he didn’t seem able to go into the chapel himself, he didn’t seem to have any difficulty firing guns into the chapel, he ordered some of his brighter zombies up front and center, gave Father Donahue one last chance then fired into the chapel, it was a slaughter. In the firing the door swung open and, from what this guy said, revealed Father Donahue kneeling in prayer, he was the last one shot, and get this, even after they were all dead the zoms STILL couldn’t go into the chapel, couldn’t or wouldn’t.”

“So Juan that answers you about the chaplain, now are you going to tell me how you managed to kill their leader’s third biggest bad boy in about 10 seconds? And tell me what the hell happened to you when you did. Because, Juan, something happened to you.”

Juan looked at the doctor, cast his face down and turned away without a word, he walked about fifteen feet away and assumed a guard like stance in the hallway. The doctor started to go after him, but stopped when Juan looked him in the eye and shook his head slowly from side to side. Sighing Sam shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe later, huh?” and ducked back into the maternity ward, leaving Juan to answer an empty hallway, “No, not even later.”

Jack and John got back a few minutes later to find Juan alone in the hallway, they looked at each other and then Jack said, “It is pretty clear, John says the zombie’s leader cleared everybody out to hike after the radio dj yesterday. We found a few dead people, but no one alive or zombified.”

“Si. No problems here either, ready to go get the others and get the doors blocked up?”

Jack and Juan left John to guard the doctors and nurses and went down the hallway to load the corpses onto a gurney and take them down the elevator to the ER. As they passed the other zombie that Juan had killed one of the men, paused to kick him several times, explaining he had killed his wife, then they unceremoniously threw his body on top of the other four and continued out into the ER. Once there they moved all the other bodies out of the way to make a path to the door, where they took their burden outside to the corner of the building and dumped it. Several more trips and all the bodies in the ER were done, though the place was still a bloody mess. A couple of the men got mops and did some clean up while the rest of the group figured out how to turn off the automatic doors. They salvaged everything they could out of the trucks before they filled the foyer area between the inner and outer doors with furniture from the lobby, it was not fool proof, but nothing was going to get through there without a lot of effort and a lot of noise. Then they called back to the Mike’s Club and heard that the other convoy was just getting underway, 8 vans, cars and trucks filled with the first 30 people and some of the supplies was heading out and should be there within an hour. Among other things they were bringing about a pallet load of the shotgun ammunition, the only kind of ammo they had found inside the Mike’s Club.

The group in the ER went back upstairs to let them know what was going on and then they split into groups one headed down to the hospital cafeteria to clear it for the incoming food, and maybe get something to eat. The others stayed up in the maternity ward, including Charlie and Sarah, whom they put into a room nearby, the Doctors were all over her when they heard she had been bitten. The others, including Terry and Jen, just kept watch on the hallways, in case there were some zombies running around. The group that went into the kitchen had an unpleasant surprise in the form of one of the cooks who had turned into a zombie, this zom jumped out at them when they entered the kitchen. Luckily she was a typical slow zombie and other than the initial scare factor, very easy to deal with. They tossed her body out the back of the kitchen into another truck dock and quickly locked the doors against the 3 or 4 zombies that were drawn to their movement when they opened the door. At least the kitchen locked up really easily. Again the men from the maternity ward got out mops and cleaned the area, spraying disinfectant over all the blood and even going so far as to wash everything caught in the unfortunate spray Juan’s bullet had made from the cooks head.

Juan was curious so he asked one of the men, “Why are you always cleaning up everything so good? The mops in the maternity ward, yeah I get that, but to do the ER and now the kitchen, man that is a lot of work, we can get it later, right amigo?”

The man just looked at Juan and replied, “No, Juan we can’t they pass this by blood contact, you get an open wound you get infected, you die, you turn, you make them stronger and us weaker. The doc said to clean up and disinfect to the best of our ability, so that is what we do, and the kitchen, well I get the impression you are going to be moving in here with us and we are going to need this to be working. So cleaning it up is very important.”

Juan left him at it and rummaged around for some food they could make quickly, he didn’t find any. Didn’t the hospital have any snacks? Apparently not. He found plenty of raw chicken, hamburger patties and other frozen meats, even steak and fish, but nothing that fell within his domain of cooking experience. Admittedly his abilities were very limited. Nanci took care of the cooking, unless it was on the grill. They were a very liberal ‘traditional’ family. Nanci still managed the household, Juan managed….to earn the money. Their system had worked out so far even if it hearkened back to the 1950’s.

Sighing Juan turned towards Jack, who was also sighing and turning towards Juan, their eyes locked and they both laughed.

“You thinking what I am thinking?”, asked Jack.

“If you are thinking that I hope Nanci is coming with them, then yeah.”, answered Juan.

“Well I was thinking something along those lines, do we dare ask Sarah, Terry or Mary for help in this or do we just say there was nothing we felt we could cook?”

“Uh, I think we just say we can’t cook and let it go at that, if they volunteer good, if someone volunteers good.”

The other men were finishing up with the last of the pans that had been sprayed and after a quick question confirmed they were not much in the way of cooking either. They went into an adjoining hallway and blockaded it to cut it off from the western wing, at least on the ground floor and then headed up to the second floor to rejoin their friends and see how Mary was doing.

The first thing they saw was a group standing outside of the door where they had put Mary. Terry turned to Juan and approached him, saying in Spanish, “They don’t know anything, they cut her up a bit, disinfected her more and started an IV, but they don’t really KNOW anything about stopping an infection like this. Hell Juan from looking at her wound I almost thing it came from a chair leg, not from being bitten.”

Shaking his head Juan replied in Spanish as well, “No, the zombie, he said he had her taste, I don’t think he was lying, maybe he was.” Shrugging Juan, went on, “Can you cook? We can’t, all the stuff down there needs to be made, like chicken or beef or whatever. I could warm up some green beans. Like a gallon of green beans. Not a very good dinner though.”

It was Terry’s turn to shake her head, “Never was much good for industrial cooking, I can help, or we can wait, I think these folks are hungry though, didn’t they have any fruit or anything to tide the mom’s over?”

“Uh no, we should have grabbed some apples and bananas, they had crackers too. Damn. Oh well a quick trip downstairs and we can get that stuff.”

“I’ll go with you, lets take Jen too, she is feeling useless up here, grab the janitors and lets head back down.”

“Janitors?” Juan asked.

“You didn’t know? Yeah they work here, the doctor played them off as nursing staff, which I guess they are, the only thing that kept them from being killed I guess.”

“Well that explains how they always know where to find the cleaning supplies. I’ll get them.”

Soon enough the group was back with a bag full of crackers and fruit, the new moms ate first, but all the former captives had a couple pieces of fruit, the group from Mike’s Club shared their granola bars around and they waited for word from the caravan while they watched the sun creep steadily towards the mountains.

Back at the Mike’s Club they were keeping close track of the caravan, which was creeping along at very slow speed towards the hospital, maybe making 20 miles per hour, so it would take them about 45 minutes to reach it. Among the riders on the caravan were most of the people who were hurt and several non-combatant women, with Nanci in the first car, urging her driver to hurry and be cautious at the same time.

Finally getting irritated he turned around and told her to keep her eyes on the sides of the road around them and stop being a back seat driver, even if she was in the back seat. Disgruntled, Nanci sat back and did as she was told, fingering the shotgun safety as she prepared to blast any zombie stupid enough to get in the way as she made her way back to the man she loved.

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This section was last updated on 30 Jul 2008

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