Free The Real Night of the Living Dead by Mark Kramer, Felix Cruz Page A

Hank. “You’re crazy. That’s behind the women’s group. You’ll have to go straight through that army that you say is headed this way.”
    “Like I said, I’m going to the children’s camp.”
    The doctor said, “I understand there are a few hundred patients there that need help, but there are thousands of patients throughout this campus that are in just as much danger. What is so important that you need to get to the children’s camp?”

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Fifteen
     
     
    I was a few days into my position at the hospital when I was first reunited with Clara Daniels. We were childhood sweethearts when she was thirteen and I was seventeen; we dated for a few months until I moved to New Jersey with my older brother. She was named after the old picture star Clara Bow around the time of the height of her popularity, 1928. She was twenty-three and an honest to God knockout.
    That morning, I was assigned to work as Clara’s attendant. She was going to be spending the day with a group of about twenty kids. They were going to waste away a few hours at the hospital’s bowling alley.
    My supervisor introduced us, and I couldn’t believe how much she changed. In a way, she even resembled Clara Bow. She had wavy brown hair that was parted to the side and hazel eyes that could put a man in a trance. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a woman.
    We sat at a table by one of the lanes. She was smiling, watching the kids enjoying themselves; most of them were happy to get out of their cottages for a while, others sat in a corner, staring at the kids playing, or staring at Clara and myself.
    I was sipping from a bottle of Coca-Cola and eating a ham sandwich that came from the kitchen. I caught Clara watching me. She said, “Are you one of these men from the prison system? The ones that opt to work here?”
    I gazed at her. Waited about a minute, letting her question hang out there, before saying, “You got it right. I’m a thug. A lowlife. A criminal. A no good dirty rotten rat. Yeah, I spent some time in the joint. You should be glad I didn’t stick around. You would be wasting your life, visiting me in prison and counting the days till I was released.”
    “That’s what love is all about,” she said. “You’re there through the good times and the bad times. I would have always been there for you.”
      “You were a kid, Clara. You didn’t love me. And if you thought you did then you didn’t know what the word meant.”
    Her brow wrinkled as she said, “How can you tell me I wasn’t in love with you? I may have been a kid, but I knew what I wanted in life. I wanted you, Veimer .” She paused. “And you threw it away. A lifetime together, you threw it away for a job with your brother in Jersey.”
    I gazed at her. The smile from her face was gone. She was telling the truth. She did love me. What a stup I was. I never realized it when we were together. But we were kids at the time. So young we were.
    For what it was worth, I apologized. Then we spoke for a little more than an hour, talking about the old neighborhood and what made her want to become a nurse.
    By the end of that day, I realized, if I didn’t love her then, then there was a feeling inside me now, a feeling of not wanting to be apart from her, wanting to hold her and never let go. I cared for her now, but I was afraid that she didn’t care two bits about me. How could I blame her after having left ten years ago?
    That night, I laid in my bed at the dorm and stared at the ceiling until long after midnight. I couldn’t fall asleep. All I could think about was Clara, how beautiful she was, how I hurt her so long ago, the feelings I had for her now, and if she may still have the same feelings for me. I decided I would try my best to win her back. That would be my goal while I was stuck here, completing my sentence.
    A few days later, during my lunch, I snuck over to the nurses’ dormitory. I asked one of the women there which