Free Alone No More by Chris Philbrook Page B

floor, either in pain, or trying to escape on the slick, blood soaked floor. In the back of her mind she laughed at the claim that the hospital executives had made that the floor was slip resistant. She wondered if the manufacturer had prepared for situations like this.
    Even without an eye for trauma medicine she caught glimpses of several people bitten. She immediately thought of her first patient Matt. He had been bitten too. 
    "Knock that prick out. Cuff him!" Cabot yelled over his shoulder at his two fellow officers struggled with the person. Sabrina watched as one officer swept a leg backwards powerfully, clearing the subject's leg out from under him, and sending them all crashing to the floor in a strangely well executed martial arts maneuver. The two uniformed men crashed down atop the bloody man, all struggling, and on any other day, with any other person, the weight of the two large men breaking ribs and collar bones alone would've stopped the fight altogether, but not this day. The rules had changed.
    The now floored man, IVs still dangling from his arms twisted his head just enough to sink his teeth into the black uniformed shoulder of one of the guards. Sabrina didn't know his name. She saw instantly that there was something profoundly wrong with the man trying to bite everyone. Something had turned his eyes a deathly, pus shade of white, and all reason and soul had left him. The bite caused immediate pain in the guard, and elicited a powerful punch from the wounded man. Sabrina watched as the biter's head rocked back from the powerful punch, and saw several of his teeth fall out onto the blood red floor. The other guard slipped a cuff over a blood slickened wrist, and deftly got the other wrist restrained. The bitten guard rolled away, darkening his already black clothes. The cuffed maniac rolled around wildly until an officer sat down firmly on his back, straddling him to hold him still.
    The noise of someone flat lining in a trauma suite sent a flurry of bodies through the room as some semblance of control returned. Cabot and the bitten officer were handcuffing the standing aggressor, and Sabrina, struck nearly dumb watched as that man's large white eyes rolled around. He was biting at the air madly, trying to snap at anything living that he sensed or saw. A nurse with more smarts about her than Sabrina slipped a mesh spitting hood over his face, hopefully mitigating the biting threat.
    "What-, what happened?" She asked as Cabot walked over near her. She wasn't asking him directly, but he answered.
    "They had two die in surgery or something. They wheeled the bodies out, and moved on, and not long after they died, they both sat the fuck up again. Angry. I guess they weren't quite dead. You see their fucking eyes? White as hell. Pure motherloving evil if I ever saw it. They bit a handful people on the arms and back before we got over. Your good Doctor Barry was one of them. He got bitten on the arm."
    "Whoa. How many people got bitten before you got them cuffed?" 
    Cabot did a quick count. "Eight. Ten maybe? They seem okay." Cabot looked at his hands, stained red from someone's blood. Sabrina thought they looked like bear paws.
    "You know Cabot, some guy on the news said that bite wounds were fatal. And that the dead folks were coming back to life and attacking people," Sabrina said, turning her gaze upwards from the man's large hands to his big eyes.
    "Are there any patients with bite wounds that aren't being directly supervised right now? Because if there are, we need to put them together and observe them away from the other patients. There's no sense risking anymore injuries."
    Sabrina thought of Matt just as she heard more screaming from the lobby she just left.
     
    *****
     
    Matt had gone on a gory rampage. The room he had died in was right near the lobby, just a scant fifteen feet from the flat screen television the crowd had all watched intently. Matt must have been able to leave the makeshift triage