EYEHEARTZOMBIES

Jones was dumbfounded. They knew. How could they know? They weren’t supposed to know, they were supposed to…. He didn’t know what they were supposed to do or be, but they weren’t supposed to be in charge of the situation or to know what was going on. It had just started! How could they KNOW ALREADY?

He swallowed and tried to breathe regularly. This was too much for him, though, he couldn’t process all of this. If they knew, they had to have been in on it, right? They can’t know otherwise. It had just happened an hour ago, maybe two. Jones swallowed again, still having trouble getting air down his sticky throat. He looked up at Elijah who looked as shocked as he was. The soldiers were somehow more proper and more relaxed at the same time. The one in the ambulance was standing as much as he could, the low ceiling made for hunched over postures, and was holding a hand out toward Elijah. “Come on, sir, I need you to exit the vehicle and come with us.” There was no question in that voice, no politeness that wasn’t strained with the weight of an order. Elijah was shocked out of their shared stare and looked over at the soldier.

“Y — yes, sir.” He tried to stand and winced when he put any weight on his leg. He scooted himself around on straight arms and his good leg until he was sitting on the floor at the back end of the ambulance. The soldier had gotten down onto the ground and was waiting next to his superior. “I’m not going to be able to walk,” Elijah said, blank honesty on his face. It looked like the same thoughts of military association were running through his head as through Jones’ Something was definitely wrong and they were caught in the middle of it. Jones moved toward the ambulance and the closest soldier put an arm across his chest.

“I’m just gonna get the crutches for him,” Jones said, more aggressively and whiney than he had wanted. He wasn’t sure how he could be aggressive and weak-sounding at the same time, but he had managed it. The soldier stared at him for a few moments longer, then moved his arm. Jones grunted quietly and moved toward the ambulance. The crutches were stored in a rectangular steel box under the seat that Elijah had been standing on. For the brief moment that he was standing there, pulling out the metal braces, Elijah was between him and the soldier. He decided to use it.

“I don’t trust this. No, don’t say anyting, don’t move.” Elijah had been on the verge of opening his mouth and turning to look at Jones. “Just listen. I don’t trust it. They’re in on it or something. I’m going to try to get us away. Somehow.” He popped the door open and started pulling out the thin metal tubing. Elijah gave the smallest nod with his head.

The crutches worked well enough to help Elijah get around on the wet pavement. The four of them walked around the ambulance toward the large tent. When they were passing the cab, Jones stopped suddenly. “Hey, I need to turn the ambulance off, give me a second.” The soldiers stopped and looked at him, then one motioned for him to go ahead. He popped open the driver’s side door and climbed in quickly. He thought about throwing it in reverse and gunning the engine, but he couldn’t leave Elijah to them. No telling what they’d do now that they knew he was bitten. He sighed and killed the ignition. He saw his medic’s bag on the passenger’s side floorboard and remembered what all he had it in. There was a sterile scalpel, a few hypodermic needles. Nothing deadly, but stuff that could be used in a pinch. He grabbed the black leather case and slid back out of the cab.

When he turned around to join the group, the lead soldier pointed and asked, “What’s that?” Neither of them looked happy.

“My bag,” Jones answered, trying to sound calm. He pointed at Elijah’s leg. “He may need help, depending on how long we’re here. I’d rather have it with me than have to run back and get it.” He hoped they didn’t have any medics with them. He was sure they’d rather use their own than trust to some paramedic from a local hospital, especially since they probably figured he had a gun hidden in the bag. “You can look through here if you think I have a gun or something,” he said, holding the bag out to them.

“Come on,” the soldier answered, turning to lead the way. Jones sighed in relief and fell in behind Elijah. The soldiers led the way and seemed to trust that the two of them would follow. Their trust wasn’t misplaced, apparently, as the two civilians followed close behind. Jones was trying to work through the bag in his mind. He knew he had a few EpiPens in there. One wasn’t always enough for a grown man, but you had to be careful when giving the second one. Too close together and you’d send him into cardiac arrest. Well, close enough. You’d probably wear his heart out first.

He remembered the defribilator that was still in the ambulance. That might have been effective, but it was out of his hands by now. No way they’d let him run back to get something like that. No way to justify needing it. Elijah was getting around just fine. And if they knew what was going on, they probably weren’t worried about keeping him alive very long. Unless they didn’t know about the bites, that is….

They had reached the tent. It was a large black canvas tent with a slicker plastic coating on the outside to keep the rain where it belonged. It didn’t quite reach the ground, so it was more like the tent’s stores used for outside sales. The bottom edge of the canvas stopped some five feet off of the ground. All four men had to duck to enter the canvas shelter.

Jones had been right. Several desks were arranged in a polygon over to the side nearest the antennae. A large computer and a laptop sat on each desk with a soldier at each one. Jones couldn’t see most of the screens, and the ones he could were mostly text read outs. One, however, had a rotating 3D diagram of something that looked like a molecule of something. He thought he had seen it before, but he couldn’t be sure.

Beyond the computer desks, toward the far end of the tent, was another large table with radio equipment on it. The radio set wasn’t very large, only a few feet square and a foot or so tall, but the rest of the desk held walkie talkies and other communications devices. A few cell phones were mixed in, it looked like.

Further into the tent was a collection of cots and chairs. A few of the cots had people laying on them, none of them in military garb. A couple of chairs had soldiers sitting in them. The people on the cots didn’t look very healthy or happy. The soldiers didn’t look happy, either. They were sitting very stiffly, each looking directly at one of the more sickly-looking residents on a cot. Someone from there coughed a few times, very wet coughs.

The soldiers were leading Elijah and Jones toward the cots. The one who seemed to be in charge nodded to the other and tapped him on the shoulder, then turned and walked over toward the computers. The soldier that was left motioned for Elijah to take a seat on the closest empty cot and pulled one of the folding metal chairs over. Jones stood where he was between the cot and the chair.

“How’re you feeling?” Jones asked Elijah. The cabbie looked up at him and smiled weakly.

“I’d be feeling a lot better if I was at the hospital,” he answered, somewhat weakly with a sidelong glance at the soldier. The soldier didn’t move or react at all to either the statement or the look. He just sat back in his chair, legs crossed, rifle sitting across his lap, looking through Elijah. Jones sat his bag down on the cot and flipped open the swinging hook latch. Elijah leaned forward a bit to peer in, but stopped looking when he saw the soldier trying to check the contents, too.

“Yeah, but how do you really feel?” Jones asked again. “Light-headed or woozy? Thick-headed, like you can’t think well? Open your mouth.” Elijah complied, somewhat slowly, after licking his lips and smacking a few times. Must have some cottonmouth, Jones thought. “Can you breathe alright?” he asked as he leaned forward with a small flashlight and a tongue depressor.

Before Elijah could answer, the other soldier came walking back. He asked, “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” Jones looked down at his hands and noticed he had forgotten to pull on a pair of latex gloves. He was about to try and make an excuse when the soldier spoke up again. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Come, it’s time for you to go back to your ambulance and go on your way. We’ll take care of your patient from here on.” He reached a hand out to take Jones’ arm to lead him away.

Jones yelled, “What? No!” and yanked his arm away. The soldier didn’t try to take his arm again immediately. He stood where he was. Jones asked again, “Why? Why can’t I take him with me to the hospital where he can get the care he needs?”

The seated soldier leaned forward to put a restraining hand on Elijah’s shoulder. Elijah had been about to stand up and he looked at the hand and sank back down on the olive-colored blanket-covered cot. He grimaced as he sat but Jones didn’t know if it was from the hand on his shoulder or the pain in his leg. He was betting on equal parts of both.

Hand on his shoulder or not, Elijah apparently decided he didn’t like this treatment enough to say something. “Yeah, I want to go to the hospital. I’m an American citizen. You can’t just keep me here!”

The soldier sitting next to him stood up to have better leverage against the sitting wounded man. Elijah looked up at him with a look that was turning into hatred on his face. “You can’t,” he said again, but weaker this time.

The soldier standing in front of Jones turned around to face Elijah. “We most certainly can. And we most certainly will. THIS is the only hospital you’ll be visiting, sir.” He turned back around to Jones. “As I said before, I think it’s time for you to leave.” He put his hand on Jones’s arm again.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘only hospital’? This man needs some serious attention!” Jones was getting to the edge of violence, now. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d wager any amount that these other people on the cots were all sick and needing medical help, too. They all had that sickly sheen that Elijah had picked up lately. An almost sweaty look, without there being any sweat. Waxy.

The soldier didn’t take hand off of Jones this time. “Come on, sir.”

“No, I want to know what’s going on. What do you know?” Jones’ eyes were wide and he stared directly into the soldier’s face. They were about the same height so it worked. The soldier stared back, then nodded.

“Fine, I’ll tell you. Once you go past this roadblock you won’t be able to leave anyway. We’ve cordoned off the next five square miles of the city, including Eden Medical, where you’re headed. I’ve called ahead and you’re expected. If you don’t show up soon, you’ll be looked for. The finding won’t be a pretty sight, I don’t imagine.

“This man,” he pointed at Elijah, “was bitten by a girl that had come back to life, correct? He’s infected, then. We’re not sure where the infection started, but we know it’s out there and spreading like wildfire. We’ve had some fifteen cases come through this tent already. In some people it catches and moves through their system like nothing we’ve ever seen. In others, like your friend here, it seems to move slower, has a harder time with the body’s natural defenses. In both cases, though, it’s fatal.”

Jones’s jaw was slack. He hadn’t been expecting this. Not at all. How could something just pop up like this? Viruses didn’t spring out of nowhere and start killing with a one hundred percent fatality rate. What were they doing to treat the infected? He decided to ask. “What — what do you do with them? To — to treat them, I mean?”

The soldier’s face was hard. “We keep them comfortable. We keep them warm. When the time comes, we keep them dead.” Elijah’s face went pale and his eyes went wide.

“I don’t wanna be no demon!” he yelled. A few of the other patients looked up at his yell and they were all wide-eyed and distressed-looking. He moaned his protest again, much quieter this time, with no force. The soldier standing over him didn’t show any signs of compassion, but he wasn’t holding him down any longer, either.

Jones stood slack. No wonder it was fatal. No one was trying to prevent it or fix it. They were just letting it run its course. Just letting this disease kill any it wanted to. He couldn’t believe it. “How — how can you justify that? How can you be OK with just killing innocent people?”

The soldier looked at him dead in the face. “When we do what we have to do, they’re not people any longer.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Come on, I’ve let you stay too long already. Your expected at the hospital in ten minutes. Check in with the staff sergeant at the front desk.”

They reached the ambulance faster going out, not slowed by Elijah’s limping progress. “Remember what I said. You’ll be looked for if you go missing. This isn’t America any more. This is martial rule and you’re expected to comply. Just get in your wagon and drive it on through to the hospital. You’ll be well taken care of. We need all the medical staff we can get. Just go on to the hospital and find out what you need to do next.” He reached out and opened the driver’s side door. “We’ll move the barricades for you to drive through.”

Jones sighed. Apparently it was worse than he had ever thought. Some disease running rampant that killed all who were infected with it. Well, it killed them and brought them back. The soldiers were the ones ultimately responsible for the final death. He still had some sneaking suspicion that somehow they were responsible, or at least tied into it. So what was a God-fearing man such as himself supposed to do? Could he justify just going along with them, letting them take care of it how they were taking care of it now? Could he just let them keep killing people who hadn’t done anything worse than get a virus? One they probably didn’t try to get, that they got by being attacked by someone else on the street? Someone that would have seemed completely insane. How did you guard against the insane?

You didn’t.

Jones nodded at the soldier and flicked the clasp on his bag as surreptitiously as he could. He turned toward the door and sat the bag on the seat, then moved his hand and tipped the bag over. “Damn it!” he cursed, the anger in his voice only partially attributable to the soldiers and their unbelievable actions. The soldier looked around the door and saw all the medical paraphenalia on the floor of the cab. “Shit, let me pick this stuff up real quick,” Jones said. The soldier nodded and continued to stand where he was. Seeing no gun on the floor or in the open bag must have made him decide there wasn’t anything Jones could really do to him.

Jones picked up a few things off the floor and seat. A couple of scalpels in their sterile paper packaging. A packet of cotton bandages for wounds. A two pack of splints for setting bones. He glanced of his shoulder and saw that the soldier wasn’t paying him any attention, he was staring into the distance, squinting at something coming this way. Jones closed his hand around a pre-packaged syringe filled with adrenaline, an EpiPen. He closed his eyes for a second and said a quick prayer that this would turn out better than he thought it would.

The packaging was almost non-existant, just the plastic tube of the “gun” with a plunger sticking out of the end. The only thing keeping it safe was a plastic plug stuck to the other end that he popped out with his fingernail. It came primed and ready, since there wasn’t much time to prepare for someone to go into anaphylactic shock. He turned toward the soldier, the syringe in his right hand. Centrifugal force carried his arm and hand up and forward, bringing the tip of the pen to the soldier’s back, just above the waistband of his pants. Jones’ thumb jammed down on the end.

The soldier jumped like had been shot, but it was too late. The liquid adrenaline was already making its way through his veins toward his heart.