Warm Bodies: The Little Brown Bear

The Second Wave

Rowan's eyes snapped open.

He stared up at the ceiling of the dimly lit ICU, hearing the distant hum of some machine, a regular clicking sound he couldn't quite place and his own even breathing, and wondered why he was awake.

A sound, muffled and strange, came from outside the room. Propping himself up on his elbows, he stared at the door, unable to put a name to what he had heard.

Something felt... wrong.

A weird unease settled between his shoulder blades, and he held his breath, waiting for the sound to come again so he could identify it.

A thump, and a soft cry.

Rowan shot bolt upright in bed, his heart suddenly racing, and froze as he stared at the door.

There was a sharp high pitched sound, cut suddenly short, and it jangled his already exposed nerves. Immediately he was off the bed, and making for the door, but jerked back as the IV line tugged on the needle in his hand.

"Ow... shit," he whispered, and went back for the IV stand, pulling it with him as he moved to the door, his bare feet pressing quietly against cool tiles. The stand squeaked as it rolled along, and the sound made him nervous.

Making too much noise...

When he reached the door, he pressed against it for a moment, hesitating on the handle before slowly drawing it down and opening the door a crack.

The hallway was dark.

What the hell?

The soft sound came again, and his ears pricked up at the noise, a weird wet grunt - something was happening further down the hall, and there were other noises too, from the bigger treatment room across the hall.

But he couldn't see anything.

Swallowing hard, Rowan moved down the hall, cursing every squeak from the IV stand. Part of him wanted to rip the damn thing out and run, but logic was clamping down, trying for reason. Something perfectly reasonable and normal was going on, right?

Right?

Someone groaned, and Rowan's skin prickled.

Wrong. Something was terribly, horribly wrong, and he had barely enough light to see by. Shit.

What could have happened? Where were the nurses? The doctor on duty? He heard another gasp, this time from behind, and he spun in place, noisily smacking the IV stand against the wall.

Then the smell hit him. Blood, piss and evacuated bowels. He knew that smell, though his senses weren't as nearly as sharp in that area as they had been for eight long years.

Death. Someone had died. Messily.

But this was a hospital. People died in hospitals all the time? Couldn't that be what that was?

Rowan glowered into the dark. Now he was just getting angry at himself. He knew exactly what was going on, he just didn't want to believe it. He'd been on the other side of this hundreds of times, the smells, the sounds...

A corpse. Maybe more than one.

Fear flooded his body and he broke out in a quick sweat, his eyes wide. How the hell was this happening? They had a cure, they had an inoculation, what happened to 'we won'?

This didn't feel like a win. He needed to get the hell out of here now.

As his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, he made out more shapes in the hallway, and through the open doorway into the large room. Shapes of beds, machines, curtains, the faint red glare of an exit sign leading out to the lobby at the far end of the hallway.