Anyway, I'm putting this under horror, though--once again--I don't get a real horror vibe from it. There's still considerably more horror-ish type stuff here than in "Knowing," so we're going with horror.
And, yeah, the plot concept behind this story is similar to "Knowing"--two people try to rescue others from a zombie infested hospital--but it's a lot different.
In theory, anyway.
Let me know?
Danger Fix
When she agreed to help David search the nearby hospital for survivors, Mackenzie hadn't been thinking about undead corpses and rotting mouths. No, she'd been thinking about David's dark, serious eyes and the fact that he had asked her--her, Mackenzie Shaine, perpetually short and skinny with red hair so bright it shone like a beacon--to go with him, to perhaps help save someone's life. It was a radical thought, and she had blurted out a yes before her logical side could catch up.
Well, it had caught up since then, and now, peering out at the hospital (or, rather, the zombies surrounding said hospital) from their hiding place beneath a broken down van, Mackenzie was feeling more than a little apprehensive.
"There's…kind of a lot," she said and winced, because, seriously, way to state the obvious, but David didn't even seem to notice that she'd said anything at all. He was silent, staring out at the masses of undead, eyes narrowed in concentration. When he turned and looked at her, Mackenzie winced again, startled by the sudden weight of his gaze.
"You ready?" he asked.
And she was. Apprehensive or not, she knew what she was doing, had learned well over the past month. Because in this new world, if you didn't learn, you died. Her survival alone was evidence of her skill--and the fact that David chose her was evidence of--what, exactly? She was good at what she did--she had her paranoid parents to thank for the martial arts and the weapons training--but she doubted she was the best choice for a rescue mission. Still, she nodded in answer to his question, because despite the amount of zombies that stood in between them and the hospital, she could feel the rush of adrenaline in her blood, and she grinned. She was so ready.
The thing about zombies, of course, was this: They were fast. Not as fast as a living, breathing, in shape human--after all, rotting flesh and deteriorating muscles tend to inhibit full speed--but they didn't shamble and limp and drag themselves like they did in the movies Mackenzie had always loved back before any of this had happened. They moved with quick, shocking precision, and if you weren't ready, their mouths were on you in a split second. Of course, a bite didn't necessarily mean broken skin. They were human, technically, and their teeth needed a hell of a lot of strength to actually cut through layers of clothing and the flesh beneath.
The real problem was numbers. Mackenzie knew she could easily take on several all by herself because even with their speed, they were clumsy and uncoordinated and weak, but when there were hundreds? Cutting a path through these things was going to be hard. Too many hands, too many teeth, too many opportunities to be knocked down and trampled, suffocated beneath hundreds of pounds of hungry, rotting bodies with their blank eyes and gnawing mouths. So not a prospect she relished.
And yet she could feel her heart pounding--not with fear, but with excitement. Every nerve in her body hummed with anticipation, and she thought that if she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window or rain puddle, her eyes would be glowing. She felt alive.
David returned her grin, and then they were moving.
When Mackenzie felt the weight of her gun in her palm as she pulled it free from the holster on her hips, she couldn't help but be irrationally pleased that the roads were to full of wrecked vehicles and piles of bodies (the actual non-moving kind) to make driving to the hospital feasible. If they were driving, she wouldn't get to kill anything, and she so wanted to kill something.
Or, well, blow something's brains out, anyway, even if it was already dead.
Once they moved past the outer fringes, though, the gun became more of a liability than an advantage. They were just too close, and she had started using it more as a melee weapon than anything, afraid to shoot and have one of the things grab her arm and cause the bullet to hit herself or David. But that was fine. She hadn't come armed with just a pistol, and she found that the heavy weight of the machete felt a hell of a lot better curved against the palm of her hand than the gun had. She also found that it sliced through flesh and skull as if human bodies were nothing more than a bit of insubstantial mist.
Except she felt each blow, felt the thunk and squish of it all the way up her arm. And she liked it. It was strange, she thought, enjoying meaty sound of blade meeting bone and flesh and soft, squishy inner organs, and she wondered if this meant she was a horrible person.
Even worse, she liked the world they lived in now with all its gore and violence, and sometimes, with a guilty little twinge that accompanied such thoughts, she was sure she preferred this new world over her old one, despite the fear, the crowded living space, the lack of privacy, the constant hunger because everything, everything had to be rationed. Despite all that, she lived for these moments of breathless danger rush when all the fear and anxiety and uncertainty were bleached away by adrenaline. She loved adrenaline. It was like pulling the whole damn world into her veins so if she bled, she'd bleed existence itself.
Never in the time before this world had she felt like that.
Life before had been safe, but it had been boring. Mackenzie had had her whole life mapped out. Now her future was as uncertain as everything else in this new world and--call her crazy--but she liked it that way. It was the world's greatest high.
"I am a horrible person," she said, the sound of her voice drowned out by the shlick of her blade breaking through skull and sliding through brain. The zombie dropped, and with that one down there were already two more scrambling to catch hold of her limbs, their blank eyes wide, frenzied, almost like they were high themselves, and she wondered if they saw her the same way she saw them--a means to a thrill that rocked their world.
One managed to curl a weak hand around her wrist and tugged. She felt herself begin to slip off balance, and she screamed, more from surprise than anything else, then twisted her arm to break its grip. Something snapped--the zombie's fingers, she assumed--and she was already swinging the machete in one fluid motion, and now neither zombie was a problem anymore.
But others were coming.
"David!" she yelled, because they had reach the hospital, but he was still fighting, swinging a pickax with easy familiarity as the zombies screeched and fell to real and final deaths at his feet. He turned when she called, though, and ran to her to help pry open the emergency exit door.
It opened easier than she would have thought, and then they were both inside, the door pressed shut behind them, David's ax wedged up beneath the handle. Neither spoke for a long moment, both trying to catch their breath, ignoring the muffled moans and the sound of fists against the door, and then David looked at her, one eyebrow arched (a talent she had always envied), and said, "So, that went better than expected."
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I guess if you expected one of us to be dead before we got here." Which was a little harsh, because really it had gone well. They had certainly cut their way through faster than she had been thinking they would.
"Don't be ridiculous," he said, and then he caught her by the wrist, much like the zombie had earlier, and started off down the hallway. "Come on. We need to stick together. There's bound to be more of them in here, somewhere--it is a hospital after all."
He was right, of course. When the outbreak first started, people were being attacked on their way home for work or the mall or whatever, sometimes violently enough to warrant a hospital visit right away. Others waited until the fever set in, but the fact remained that most of the early victims gathered in the hospitals, causing them to be the central points of destruction as the virus spread from the infected to those who were seeking medical help for something entirely different. The hospitals became death traps (Nothing new about that, Mackenzie had thought snidely because she's always sort of hated hospitals), but it was still possible that there were survivors, people who figured out what was going on soon enough to sequester themselves away in a separate room, away from the hordes of the undead.
There could be someone alive in here.
It was a nice thought, and Mackenzie hoped it was true, but it had been a month--even ignoring the zombies there were starvation and dehydration to worry about. And then, of course, there was the fact that any survivors could be sick or injured, because it was a hospital after all, and generally people didn't pop up there for no reason.
"Do you hear that?"
She blinked, startled from her thoughts. "What?"
He put a finger to his lips and tipped his head in the direction of another long hallway. Mackenzie went still, listening, hardly even breathing. She could hear the scuffing of too many slow, unhurried feet on the linoleum floor along with the intermittent moans of the dead (she wasn't sure why they made sounds at all--she wondered if maybe being dead hurt), but these were sounds that were to be expected. She doubted David had stopped her because of them.
And then there it was.
Laughter.
Mackenzie shuddered. "s**t, man, I don't think the zombies are the creepiest things in here."
David flashed a grin but sobered quickly. "If that's a survivor, he could be infected. The fever makes people delirious sometimes."
"I know that," she snapped, though she wasn't sure why she felt so defensive. Maybe because the idea of delirium hadn't occurred to her--it was just such a normal explanation, and that laugh…that laugh, here, in this dark, death filled place…it was chilling.
The laughter rang out again, closer this time, the sound of it echoing off the walls and underscored by the moans of the zombies somewhere down the hall, their movements quickening with agitation. They heard it, too. Mackenzie couldn't help but wonder if the sound of the laughter only reminded them of their hunger or if they sensed the horrible wrongness of it as well.
David's dark eyes narrowed. "Let's go."
She wanted to protest, to tell him that she had come to kick some zombie butt, chop off a few heads, and rescue nice, normal, sane people, not some guy whose psyche had been so mangled by whatever had happened to him, that he thought laughter was an appropriate response to this whole damn horror. But David was looking at her, waiting, and, with a sigh, she figured that as long as he was happy, this rescue mission wasn't a total loss.
No matter how creepy it got.
"Fine," she said as they started down the hallway, picking off zombies as they came across them, "let's go rescue the crazy kid who may or may not be turning into a zombie at this very moment, but I swear to God, David, if he bites me, I'm gonna go poltergeist on your a** when I die."
Shooting a rushing corpse in the head, David scoffed. "You won't die. Maybe lose a limb. You know that if the infected area is removed from the body soon enough--"
"God! Shut up! I'm so not interested in listening to my options in case psycho kid takes a chunk out of me." Scowling, she quite happily took a chunk out of one of the zombies that had jumped at them from a side room--with her machete and not her teeth. Gross.
"Don't worry. I won't let him bite you."
She glared, ignoring the zombie whose spine she had just broken and its pitiful attempts to catch hold of her ankle. "I can take care of myself, thanks. How about I won't let him bite you."
"Aw, c'mon, Mackenzie." He grinned at her. "All that feminism stuff is for the dark ages. We live in Zombie World now."
"Yeah, and in Zombie World I can kick your a** and kill you with a machete." She stabbed the blade in his direction for emphasis, then scowled at him. "So there."
His grin widened, and she could see that he was holding back a laugh. It was then that she noticed the other laughter had stopped, and she froze, a chill running down her spine. "He's quiet now," she whispered.
David nodded, tilting his head to the side as he listened carefully. In the silence that filled this part of the hospital now that they had eliminated the zombies and the disturbing laughter had ceased, Mackenzie could make out the faint sound of someone moving on the other side of one of the doors. It wasn't a zombie--that was immediately apparent to her. The movements were too quick, too purposeful as each step was measured into an even rhythm, and most of all they were just too damn quiet. Zombies didn't care about the amount of noise they made, and their feet thumped and scuffed noisily. Whoever was on the other side of the door, he was taking pains to be quiet, though he wasn't quiet enough.
Mackenzie glanced at David to confirm that he had heard it, too, and he nodded.
Then he broke the door down.
Mackenzie yelped, shocked, and glared at him. "Was that necessary?"
He ignored her, all his attention on the occupant of the room, a dark haired boy around their own age whose blue eyes were blown wide with fear.
"Hey," David said, voice gentle, "we're here to save you."
For a moment a manic grin tugged at the boy's mouth, and Mackenzie was sure he was going to start laughing again--and if he did, she was getting the hell out of there--but the grin dropped away as suddenly as it had appeared, and instead the boy burst into tears.
Mackenzie sighed. He laughed when he was alone and cried when he was rescued. Poor kid was messed up. Still, as she watched David kneel down beside him, all gentle touches and soothing words, she felt suddenly and deliriously happy. She had gotten her danger fix, David obviously liked her (she was pretty sure teasing was his version of flirting), and they had rescued someone after all.
Life didn't get much better than this.
