Free LZR-1143: Within by Bryan James

sticking them firmly into her pockets. She wondered whether she’d ever get to wash her clothes again. Surely, the blood would remain.
    “We should move the body, we don’t know if she …”
    The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the loud clanging of a slammed door, and a body flew out from the basement doors, pressing itself against the door as it shut again.
    Almost simultaneously, her ears rang with a scream of pain as Cam erupted in a blood-curdling yell. She flew from the desk top and away from his scream of pain, staring at the site of Beverly’s pale face latched on to Cam’s cheek. Even as he screamed and pummeled her with his fists, the skin of his face peeled slowly away from his jaw, and Bridget felt bile slam into the back of her teeth as his teeth showed through the jagged tear.
    From across the room, someone yelled loudly, their voice a frantic plea for help.
    And that’s when things got interesting.
    Unknown to the people inside the large, windowless building, the power in the building had been cut after a large tractor trailer, traveling at nearly ninety miles per hour at the time of the impact, had sheered a power coupling in half four blocks away. The resulting impact severed the power feed to the building, and the large grid within which the building was situated.
    However, the massive hospital one block away was a priority for the local government. In an admirable feat of governmental responsiveness, utility crews were dispatched—even during the initial confusing hours of the outbreak—to bring the hospital, and the rest of its grid, back online. Those crews had worked diligently, suspended high above the city streets in several different vehicles, to restore power and give the doctors and nurses of Harbor Island General the ability to help as many people as they could.
    Tragically, these brave workers—many of who would ultimately perish from thirst or starvation suspended above the city streets—worked long after the results of their labor were in vain.
    Harbor Island General was overrun merely two hours into the epidemic.
    But the power was restored four hours later.
    Precisely at the time that Beverly heard Cam scream.
    Precisely at the time that Louis appeared from the basement below.
    As the last two red emergency lights began to wane, and as Louis called across the cavernous space, the fluorescent lights far above the heads of the assembled night shift began to flicker. Simultaneously, five hundred computer hard drives began to hum within their housings, and five hundred monitors showed the static, monochromatic emblem of the installed operating systems. Bathroom lights illuminated empty stalls. Air conditioning systems began to spool up. A radio that had been playing softly on someone’s desk before the outage hissed its static rage. A clock on the wall far above their heads illuminated large red numbers.
    And the outer doors, manually armed on a separate circuit but hardwired to reset when power had been restored, clicked softly in their housings. Steel beams retracted from the heavy frames and a horn blasted once, from inside the building. Outside the building, massive external floodlights—also programmed to automatically illuminate the entrances to the large building—shone on hundreds of assembled bodies, churning against the doors, and each other.
    Inside the building, near the bottom of the large flight of stairs leading to the second floor, the man who used to be Rajesh pushed his broken, bloody frame up slowly from the dirty carpet. His dead eyes moved slowly in their sockets, and he fumbled to right himself on an awkwardly angled leg.
    Had Rajesh been alive, he would have screamed in dire agony, as the shattered leg crunched with the effort. Shards of bone scraped against the carpet, catching in the weave as he slid forward on his two hands and one leg, bent over himself as if stooped with great age.
    He didn’t know pain.
    But he knew hunger.
    Across the room, shouts