I forced my heavy eyelids open, taking in harsh lab lights.
I tried to sit up, but something was across my chest, restraining me. Pain
suddenly flooded my body, causing a single tear to escape my eye. Where the
hell was I, and what had happened to me? I looked down to find that my arms and
legs where covered in mud, and I remembered that I had been shot and left to
die in the mud.
I heard a door open and close and suddenly the room was
filled with sound. I couldn’t escape it. A chair slid across the room, a woman
was gossiping about another doctor, and someone was chewing gum loudly. Every
sound felt as if someone were playing the drums inside of my ears.
“Who are you people?” I asked.
Everything seemed to stop. It was like they hadn’t expected
me to speak. I heard the loud clicking of heels as someone walked over to me,
but my vision was too blurry to make out who it was. “I’m sorry for your loss,”
said a female voice.
“My loss….” My voice trailed off as I realized she meant
Eli. Eli had been everything to me and now he was gone. I wanted to feel
something, but I just felt numb and exhausted. Maybe it was because I knew what
Eli and I had was over long before he’d been infected. Did I even love him
anymore? I thought I did, but I had left him when he needed me.
Suddenly, the table I was lying on moved forward. “Where are
we going?” I asked as shapes and forms moved past me in such a hurry that I
couldn’t make out what any of them where.
“We weren’t sure you were going to wake up so we had you in
the morgue, but now I think it’s more appropriate for you to be in a guest
room,” she said, her words echoing in my ears.
“I’m not your guest. I want to leave,” I said, as if it
would do me any good. I knew I was at her mercy, but what did she want from me?
Was she working for Dr. Haines, the woman who claimed to have a cure for ‘zombie’
infections or was she working of her own accord?
There was a loud buzzing sound and then everything became
clear. I could see the pretty brunette woman who was pushing my bed into a
large elevator. “What is this place?” I asked her as she pressed one of the
buttons.
“It was an old women’s hospital. We’ve turned it into a
medical center to help those taken by the late Dr. Haines,” she said the last
few words with a smug smile.
“If you wanted to help me you wouldn’t have tied me to this
table,” I said, nodding towards the thick ropes that bond me to the table.
“The ropes are for your own protection. We weren’t sure how
you would react to being here,” she said.
The elevator doors opened with a low humming sound that
seemed to crawl inside my ears. Everything was loud again, it was as if voices
and sounds were magnified. I heard everything, from the whispers of a nurse, to
a chair scraping the floor in the cafeteria. I barely had time to wonder what
was wrong with me as people rushed past us in lab coats and scrubs, it was as
if I were in a real hospital. Was there such a thing as a real hospital
anymore? I thought the world had ended three years ago when the dead stopped
being dead and started eating the living.
A young man wearing a lab coat joined us. “I’m glad to see
you’re awake. May I ask your name?” He said as he flipped through some papers
on a clipboard.
“Zoey.”
I felt the ropes that bound me go limp and I realized that
he had cut them away. I sat up, but the room seemed to spin. I was dizzy and I
felt nausea overtake me. I struggled to regain my composer as I was wheeled
into a quiet room. The young man closed the door behind us, just as my
surroundings settled. I wanted to stand, but I knew that I wasn’t well enough. “What
the hell is wrong with me?” I asked.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, but you’re healing,” he
said, pointing to my arm.
There was a bandage on my arm, right over where my bite mark
had been. I slowly pulled the cloth from my arm, surprised to find undamaged
skin beneath it. What did that mean? Was the wound killing me, or was it
actually healing me?
