Free Medora: A Zombie Novel by Wick Welker Page B

ned the emergency exit doors and he felt a cool breeze grace his sweaty back from the crack in the door. In the moment of panic, he had completely forgotten about emergency exit doors.
    In a burst of radiant hope, he slammed his back at the door and fell out towards a completely empty alleyway. The natu ral sunlight flooded his eyes as he fell to the ground with the sick crowd clutching immediately after him from the doorway. Watching them as they started falling on top of him, he leapt to his feet and sprinted towards the street, his feet squishing in his shoes from the soaking mess of body parts that he came from. His entire body was coated in infected moisture from the stairwell. He had no time to think about cleaning or worry about getting infected. He already gotten so much in his mouth and eyes, he felt like it was pointless to even try. Then he stopped and thought about Dave. He looked back, seeing people streaming from the doorway, flopping over each other and he could only hope that Dave stayed behind with the others and not gotten swallowed up in the crowd.
    As he ran, he only saw cars on the street from his view in the alley. There were no crowds or mobs of infected people trying to swarm him. Just a few people running with a coordinated stride that suggested that they weren’t yet sick. When he made it out to the street, he realized why half of it was empty and the other half looked like a street concert. The entrance of the building had three rows of riot police blocking the street, staving off an immense crowd of the sick. The police were equipped with large plastic shields, rubber ball rifles and gas masks. They were methodically firing non-lethal weapons and gas canisters at the crowd, subduing the advances of the mob. The riot police had prevented the alley he was in from getting flooded with the sick. He could see the front doors of his office building, facing the street, completely crowded with the sick. If he had gone through the lobby of the building, he would’ve been torn apart, he thought. Down the other end of the street people were fleeing into buildings, hiding in stores or running to the underground subways. The riot police were the only things stopping a massive flooding of the sick throughout all the city blocks behind him.
    The sun was sinking behind buildings, slanting its light through the narrow slits among the skyscrapers of the city and bouncing off windows. Keith could see the entire block behind the police flooded with writhing bodies and taxicabs. The infected people walked with obscene irregularity. Each gait of their steps was different from the one before. They shuffled, fell on one another and writhed on the pavement while other bodies piled on top. By sheer force of the sick, a bus had been turned on its side. They piled up beside it, climbing upward, creating a heap of human body mass until the bus was overturned into a newsstand. They soon swarmed around and on top of the bus until it was merely a rectangular shape of moving bodies. It was as if the entire portion behind the police had become a writhing swarm of maggots infiltrating every portion of a carcass, crowding orifices and burrowing into skin.
    They had broken every street assessable window and were stumbling into shops and apartment buildings. Keith could hear a constant flow of screams and cries for help coming from the mob; people trapped amongst the sick, crowded and swamped by hair and limbs. He heard a cry from above and saw a woman at a window ledge on the third story of a building. The sick were behind her within the room where they had stranded her to the ledge of the building. An arm clutched from within, knocking her from the window. He watched her fall into a mass of bodies below, greatly breaking her fall. She attempted to get to her feet but her struggle had drawn the attention of the sick that enclosed her in a capsule of wavering bodies. They wildly swung their arms at her. One was kneeling on her torso