Free The Z Club by J.W. Bouchard

his head, the cable protruding from his mouth.  He started to crawl forward.  Fred’s eyes widened, and for a second he forgot all about the pain in his chest.  He leaned forward, grabbed the handle of the carving knife which was still embedded upright in the floor, and jabbed the blade into the top of the man’s head.  More blood spurted from monster man’s mouth, and then he lowered his head.  Fred waited.  This time the man didn’t get up.
    Fred stayed on the floor, working to catch his breath.  He waited for his heart to decide what it wanted to do.  After a couple of minutes, the pain in his chest subsided.  The house call from hell, he thought as he picked himself up.  He needed a beer.

Chapter 11
     
    Ryan was thrown backward.  He struck the wall and fell onto a gurney before finally hitting the floor.  Branagan, the majority of his face missing, towered over him.  His shiny star-shaped badge was no longer pinned to his shirt, but was instead sticking out of the side of his cheek, planted deeply enough that two of the star’s spokes were trapped entirely beneath flesh.  The Sheriff hauled Ryan up by his hair and said, “I’m gonna enjoy eatin’ your brains, boy.  Real slow .”
    Ryan felt himself sailing through the air again, this time colliding with a metal cart.  The cart toppled over, spilling surgical tools across the floor.  Instinctively, Ryan’s hand went for his firearm, but brushed the worn leather of his empty holster.  He could see his Glock in the corner, ten feet behind Branagan.  Sheriff Branagan advanced, smiling down at him, his face looking like something that should have been on display at the Body World Exhibit.  The Sheriff sniffed the air.  “Goddamn, your brain smells gooood .”
    When Ryan had arrived at the hospital fifteen minutes earlier, it had looked like a scene out of a disaster movie.  An ambulance, lights still flashing, had crashed through the hospital’s front doors.  Ryan had had to climb over the vehicle’s hood to gain access to the hospital.  Inside, bodies were strewn everywhere, many of them mutilated beyond recognition.  And whatever had caused the massacre hadn’t discriminated; patients, nurses, and doctors littered the floor.
    But that wasn’t the half of it, and Ryan had known then that there would never be a way to unsee any of it.  Jesus, he had thought, am I really seeing this?
    Not everyone was dead, but it had taken Ryan’s mind a long time to decipher what that meant, because the people that were alive weren’t normal by any stretch of the imagination.  He had seen a woman with gray hair and wearing a nurse’s uniform bent over an obese man, one of his nipples clamped between her teeth, tugging on it until she bit down and snapped it off; he had seen a little boy, no more than nine or ten, his head bald (probably from chemo, Ryan had thought absently), burrowing his face into Dr. Kirkman’s open chest cavity.  The boy made slurping sounds like a cat lapping milk out of a bowl.  Ryan had gagged, one hand cupped over his mouth, while drawing his gun with the other.  “Stop!” he had shouted at the boy, and when the boy had slowly turned his head, Ryan had seen Kirkman’s liver hanging from the boy’s mouth like a giant pink slug.  Ryan had squeezed the Glock’s trigger and blown the boy’s brains out.
    Right away, he had thought: zombies , and his mind had immediately rejected that explanation.  But as he had made his way down the long hallway, peering into room after room, the fluorescents lining the ceiling overhead flickering off and on, his brain had gradually accepted the truth.
    By the time he turned left at the hallway’s first intersection, he had emptied his Glock’s magazine.  He ejected the spent magazine and loaded a full one from his duty belt.  He had made a beeline for one of the hospital’s emergency exits when Sheriff Branagan’s voice had echoed down the hall.  “Where do ya think you’re