Chapter 15: The Horde
Trev's hand trembled slightly as he aimed his rifle at Bill. He did not like this one bit, but it had to be done.
"Trev!" Zoey gasped.
"He's infected," he growled. "I'm sorry, Bill."
"Wait! Stop, please!" Zoey exclaimed. "We went through this exact same thing with Louis. But he's immune! So there's a chance that Bill could be too."
The tall man did not lower his weapon. "The chances of that are very slim, Zoey."
"So, what? We should just shoot him without even giving it a chance?"
"She's tellin' the truth, son," Bill spoke out. "Francis here was about to pump Louis full of buckshot, but we managed to convince him otherwise."
Trev turned to the biker beside him. "That true?"
Francis gave a small nod. Trev finally lowered his gun, but he still looked uneasy.
"Come on," Zoey said, leading them back toward Louis' room. "Louis can explain it better."
A short while later, after resetting the door/bucket alarm system, they were all standing in Louis' room as he retold his story to the others. Joe came to stand next to Zoey.
"I'm glad you're alright," he said quietly.
She gave him a small smile in return. However, she was seriously worried about Bill. What if he wasn't immune…?
"…and that's it," Louis said as he finished his story.
"Amazing… Although, I suppose that there are always anomalies with new viruses," Roger mused.
"How long does it usually take for someone to turn?" Trev asked.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I can't say. Everyone's different. Most cases I've seen, the patient turns a few minutes after they've been infected. However, I've seen a couple of people take as long as an hour or two to turn."
Bill turned to face the group. "We've been immune so far, but..." He paused to look at the scratch across his face in the reflection of the window and sighed heavily. "Well, if I start to turn, promise that you'll shoot me."
There was a sombre silence.
"What if just your beard starts to turn? Can I shoot that?" Francis deadpanned, uncharacteristically trying to lighten the mood.
Bill chuckled. "You're an idiot."
Everyone was startled by a loud howl echoing throughout the hospital ward, and their heads turned uneasily toward the door.
"What the hell was that?" Joe uttered.
Without another word, Francis and Bill grabbed their weapons and moved off to investigate the sound. Moments later, a loud metal CLANG sounded – the door/bucket alarm system had been tripped. Staccato gunfire erupted a second later.
"Shit!" Zoey cried, rushing to the bed and helping Louis to his feet.
Joe and Roger grabbed their Uzis, and everyone rushed out of the room to see Bill and Francis slowly retreating back toward the help desk, sending a hail of lead down the corridor.
"What the hell is going on?" Roger yelled over the noise.
"The Infected have broken through!" Bill yelled. "All that noise we made shooting at those damn Hunters must have attracted their attention!"
"This is bad, this is really bad…"
"Ha!" Trev hollered, raising his M-16 to his shoulder. "Let 'em come! My trigger-finger's been itchin' all day!"
The seven survivors opened fire with their various weapons, their combined efforts tearing through the Common Infected as they ran down the corridor. However, Roger caught a flash of movement to his left and swung his Uzi around to see more people spilling around the wall on the other side of the help desk.
"Shit!" he swore, taking down two of them with a burst of gunfire.
However, there were too many, and Roger was brutally tackled through a doorway into a side room. The other survivors looked back in fear when they heard him start screaming.
"Nooooo!" Joe yelled, rushing back to the door and blowing away the infected people mauling the doctor. However, he was too late. Roger was already dead, his intestines splayed out across the floor. "FUCK!"
Bill felt a pang of sorrow strike his heart, but did not let up on his stand. "Zoey, Louis, cover the other side of the desk!" he yelled over his shoulder. "We can't let that happen again!"
The former college student swung her shotgun around and blasted a haggard-looking man off his feet in a spray of gore, while Louis cut down two more with a withering burst from his submachine gun. However, the Infected kept on coming.
"Fall back!" Bill finally ordered, motioning them down a corridor behind him. The others complied, with the bloodthirsty horde hot on their heels. "We need to get to the roof!" the war veteran shouted.
"We can use the elevator!" Trev yelled back. "It still has power – "
However, he was cut off when a particularly fast infected man caught up with him and tackled him to the ground.
"TREV!" Joe screamed.
He stopped dead and resumed shooting at the Infected rushing them. The others stopped as well and fired their weapons down the hallway. Trev came up swinging – he had unsheathed a knife and was now fighting for his life. However, more and more Common Infected approached, replacing the fallen faster than the survivors could take them down. Trev was surrounded, but he kept on fighting. He was eventually lost from view.
Joe shouted angrily, firing his Uzi until it ran out of ammo. "Die, you bastards!" he yelled, casting it aside and drawing a pistol.
"We gotta keep moving!" Bill yelled, turning to retreat.
"Joe, let's go!" Zoey called, turning to follow her group.
She looked back in horror when she heard him cry out, just in time to see him get overwhelmed by several infected people. They bit, scratched, kicked and clawed at him mercilessly, oblivious to his screams of agony.
"JOE!" the young woman screamed, blasting away the attackers with several blasts from her shotgun. She ran over to his limp form lying on the ground.
"Zoey, what are you doing?" Bill yelled angrily. He, Louis and Francis stopped once more and resumed their cover fire.
She reached Joe to find that he was still alive, although badly injured. "Come on, we're getting out of here together." She put his arm around her shoulder and helped him to his feet.
The five remaining survivors made their way down the hallway in a fighting retreat, and threw themselves into a large, joined dorm. Bill leaned against the door, and several moments later, the incessant pounding began on the other side.
Zoey gently set Joe down on the bed and looked at him with tears in her eyes. "I'm so sorry," she whispered.
He smiled weakly. "Don't be... I... I'm not going to make it... But you and your friends can still escape..." He groaned in pain. "I... I'm glad I met you..."
She choked back a sob, grasping his hand tightly. Joe had already accepted that he was going to die. He was such a kind-hearted man. He did not deserve to die. None of them did. Why was this happening?
"Promise me..." Joe whispered, his vision fading. "Promise me..."
"Anything," she replied.
"Promise me... you'll stay safe..." He coughed up some blood, and then fell back to the pillow. "Good luck... and survive."
With that said, his eyes rolled back into his skull and his body went limp. Zoey let go of his hand and slowly backed away from the bed, raising her pistol. The pounding outside the door reverberated throughout the room, and a loud CRACK of splintering wood followed momentarily as the Infected smashed a hole through the door.
"They're breaking in!" Bill yelled as he unloaded a burst from his assault rifle through the hole.
"RRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
A strangled scream of animalistic rage erupted as Joe rose from the bed, vomiting blood all over the sheets. His eyes were fixed on Zoey, but there was no recognition in them. There was only hunger, and a ravenous desire to tear her flesh from her bones.
BLAM!
His head jerked back as blood spurted from the single bullet-hole in his forehead. He crumpled back to the bed, never to move again. Zoey lowered the still-smoking pistol, her entire body shaking violently. She had seen many terrible things over the past two weeks, but she had never witnessed a person turn before her very eyes before. It made her feel sick to her very roots.
Until now, Zoey had never had to shoot someone she knew or recognised. Aside from her very first kill at the initial outbreak...
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"Shit!" Francis yelled as he fired another round through the hole in the door at a mangled arm reaching for him. "We have to get out of here!"
Zoey hurtled over to Bill and grabbed his shoulder. "Help me push the bed in front of the door!"
Together, they ran over to their friend's death-bed and pushed it up against the door.
The former student looked down at the body on the bed. "Thank you, Joe." She then looked over at a door on the far side of the room. "Through there! We'll be able to get around the Infected and make for the elevator!"
Francis fired off one more round through the hole in the door, before turning to follow the others out of the room.
With the main horde held up behind them, the four remaining survivors charged through the ward, blowing away any straggling Common Infected that got in their way.
"There's the elevator!" Louis shouted.
He and the others ran to the elevator and pushed the button to call it. He saw the number display at the top tick down as the elevator hurtled down the shaft toward their floor.
"Come on... come on..." he hissed through gritted teeth, pounding the button several more times, just as a large crowd of maniacs began to spill around the corner.
"They've caught up!" Bill yelled, opening fire with his assault rifle.
The others joined in, taking down the leading Common Infected. Bodies tumbled over each other and were trampled on as the horde clawed their way down the hallway in a desperate bid to reach the survivors.
"Come on, you fucking elevator!" Francis yelled, his shotgun blowing away an infected woman in mid-air as she leapt at him. Her blood sprayed down his front. "DAMN IT! NOT THE VEST!"
"Elevator's here!" Zoey yelled as the doors behind them opened. "Get in!"
The four survivors piled into the elevator and quickly punched the button for the roof. They continued to shoot through the doorway at the horde until the metal doors finally slid closed. The sound of many fists pounding on the other side came a moment later. However, the noise faded as the elevator ascended.
Zoey and Louis leaned against the walls and slumped to the floor, breathing collective sighs of relief, while Bill reloaded his rifle.
"I hate elevators," Francis said as his gaze wandered. "I hate hospitals." There was a moment of awkward silence. "I hate helicopters."
Louis shook his head in a mixture of shock at just seeing his new friends die, and exasperation at Francis' stupidity.
"Before he died, Roger told me that the helicopter was supposed to be reaching the roof at 0700 hours." Bill looked down at his watch. "That's an hour from now. Once we reach the top, we make for the helipad."
"In case you've forgotten, there's a horde right behind us," Francis said sullenly. "They're probably climbing the stairs after us right now."
Zoey spoke up with renewed determination in her voice. "I promised the others that we'd escape. So we are going to escape. We have to defend the helipad until the helicopter arrives."