Nightfall Protocol:A Zombie Romance

Chapter Five

The words hung in the air between us, heavier than anything the last hour had thrown at me. "What do you mean, on purpose?"

Mia glanced past me, down the corridor, as if the walls themselves might be listening. "Before all this started, I was here doing a piece on hospital funding cuts. Boring stuff, budget hearings, nothing that should've gotten anyone killed." She swallowed hard. "But two nights ago, I overheard something I wasn't supposed to hear. A meeting in the administrative wing, after hours. Men in suits, not hospital staff. They were talking about a 'trial,' about 'containment protocols failing,' about needing 'a controlled test environment.'"

My stomach tightened. "You think they did this? Deliberately?"

"I don't think, Andrew. I recorded it." She patted her jacket pocket, where a small flash drive was clipped inside a hidden seam — the kind of trick only a career investigative reporter would think to use. "I hid a copy of the audio here before things went crazy. I was planning on running the story once I had more evidence. I didn't think—" Her voice cracked. "I didn't think it would happen tonight."

I thought of the patient Dr. Voss had described — the man who'd come in claiming he'd been bitten near the industrial docks, the one whose bloodwork had come back clean before he died and reanimated. That wasn't an accident. That was a delivery system.

"NPS needs to hear this," I said, my mind already racing ahead to protocols, to chains of custody, to how deep this thing might go if someone had engineered an outbreak inside a civilian hospital. "This isn't just a containment job anymore. This is something bigger."

Mia nodded, some of her reporter's instinct cutting through the fear now, sharpening her focus. "There's more. The name that kept coming up in that meeting — they called it ORDA. I don't know what it stands for. But whoever they are, they have people inside this hospital's admin structure. Maybe inside the police department too."

The implications settled over me like a physical weight. If a shadow organization had people embedded that deep, then my own call for backup earlier tonight might not have gone where I thought it did. The silence on the radio after my last transmission — the total absence of any response — suddenly felt less like bad luck and more like something else entirely.

A distant sound echoed from further down the hallway — multiple footsteps, uneven, dragging. Not one of the creatures. Several.

"We need to move," I said, grabbing Mia's arm gently but firmly. "Now."

We retraced my path back toward the stairwell, moving as quickly as my leg would allow, Mia matching my pace despite the fire extinguisher still gripped white-knuckled in one hand — she'd refused to set it down, and honestly, I didn't blame her. Every shadow in that hallway felt like it was hiding something now, every flicker of the emergency lighting a potential threat.

We reached the stairwell without incident, but the sounds behind us were growing louder, more numerous. Whatever had been contained to the east wing wasn't staying contained anymore.

"The loading dock," I said, descending as fast as my leg would allow. "There's an exit through the alley. It should still be clear."

"Should be?" Mia's voice carried equal parts exhaustion and dark humor, a reminder of exactly why we'd stayed friends for over two decades. "Great. Very reassuring, Ferguson."

"Best I've got tonight."

We hit the ground floor and pushed through the loading dock exit, back out into the alley where this whole nightmare had started for me. The night air hit different now — colder, sharper, carrying the distant wail of sirens finally, finally closing in from somewhere across the city. Backup. Real backup, or at least something that sounded like it.

Mia stopped just outside the dock, catching her breath, looking back at the hospital looming behind us — dark windows, flickering emergency lights, the building itself now feeling like some kind of tomb rather than the place of healing it was built to be.

"How many people were in there?" she asked quietly. "How many didn't make it out?"

I didn't have an answer for that. Not one either of us wanted to hear.

"We'll figure out how bad this is," I said instead. "But right now, we need to get that recording somewhere safe. And we need to figure out who else in NPS we can actually trust."

She looked at me, something steady returning to her eyes despite everything. "You think it goes that high?"

"I think whoever's behind ORDA wanted this contained quietly. And the only way to guarantee silence is to control who responds." I thought of the eerie lack of backup, of how I'd been the only one who'd made it inside before whatever chaos had fully unfolded. "I don't think I ended up alone here by accident, Mia."

The weight of that settled between us as the sirens grew louder, closing in on Medifi from multiple directions now. Whatever happened next, whoever showed up to answer that call — I needed to know if they were here to help, or here to make sure nothing about tonight ever saw daylight.

I checked my weapon's magazine one more time, some steadying ritual in a night that had upended everything I thought I understood about my job, my agency, and the world I'd sworn to protect.

"Stay close," I told her. "This isn't over. I don't think it's even started."