Nightfall Protocol:A Zombie Romance

Chapter Two

The alley narrowed the further I went, brick walls pressing closer on either side, the flickering light behind me giving way to near-total darkness ahead. I kept my back low against the wall, g*n raised, every sense stretched taut. The sound grew louder with each step — that wet, tearing noise, punctuated now by a low, guttural growl that didn't belong to anything human.

I turned the corner.

And there it was.

A man — or what had once been a man — crouched over a body sprawled across the concrete, tearing into it with a hunger that made my stomach lurch. His skin was gray, mottled with patches of black rot, stretched too tight in some places and hanging loose in others like it no longer fit the frame beneath it. His mouth and chin were slick with blood, and when he lifted his head to look at me, his eyes were milky white, unseeing in any normal sense, yet somehow fixed directly on me.

Every instinct I had screamed at me to run. Every part of my training told me to hold my ground.

"Sir." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Hands up. You're under arrest."

I don't know why I said it. Force of habit, maybe. Some last, desperate grasp at a world where badges and warnings still meant something, where the rules I'd built my life around still applied.

The thing didn't comply. Of course it didn't.

It turned toward me fully now, rising from its crouch with a jerking, unnatural motion, joints popping audibly in the silence. And then it screamed — not a human scream, but something guttural and wrong, a sound that seemed to claw its way up from somewhere far beneath a human chest cavity. It lunged.

I didn't hesitate. Training took over where thought left off, and I put a round straight through its skull.

The creature's head snapped back, then separated from its body in a spray of dark, viscous blood — nothing like the bright red I was used to seeing. It hit the ground with a wet thud, and its body staggered forward another two or three steps on momentum alone before finally collapsing in a heap beside the corpse it had been feeding on.

Silence returned. Just my ragged breathing, and the distant hum of the flickering pharmacy light behind me.

I stood there for a long moment, g*n still raised, waiting for my brain to catch up with what I'd just done. I'd killed before — it came with the job, more than most cops ever had to deal with — but never anything like this. Never something that used to be a person, walking around long after it should have stopped.

I forced myself to move closer, training kicking in despite the bile rising in my throat. The body it had been feeding on was beyond recognition, and I made myself look away before my mind could catalogue any more detail than it already had.

That's when I noticed something on the ground near the wall — a phone, cracked screen still glowing faintly. I picked it up, and my chest tightened when I saw the lock screen. A photo of Mia and me, arms slung around each other, taken at some bar two years back on her birthday.

This was her phone.

"Mia," I said out loud, though there was no one to hear it. My hands were shaking now, adrenaline finally starting to bleed away and leave something rawer underneath. I turned the phone over, searching for any clue, any sign of where she might have gone. The screen was too damaged to unlock — cracked glass fracturing the display into a spiderweb of shattered light.

I pocketed it anyway. It was all I had.

A noise behind me — a scrape of something against concrete — spun me around, weapon raised again before I even registered the motion. But it wasn't another one of those things. It was a woman, maybe mid-thirties, wearing scrubs soaked through with blood that wasn't necessarily her own. She was pressed into a doorway, eyes wide with terror, one hand clamped over her mouth to keep from making a sound.

"Please," she whispered, the second she saw my badge glinting faintly beneath my jacket. "Please, you have to help. There are more of them. So many more."

"Are you hurt?" I kept my voice low, steady, lowering my weapon slightly so I wouldn't spook her further.

She shook her head, though the movement was jittery, unconvincing. "I'm Dr. Voss. Sarah Voss. I work — I worked — in the ER." Her voice cracked on the last word. "It started an hour ago. Maybe less. A patient came in, said he'd been bitten by something. We didn't believe him at first. Then he died on the table, and two minutes later he wasn't dead anymore."

The words hit like ice water. "How many are there? Inside the hospital?"

"I don't know. Dozens. Maybe more by now." Her eyes darted past me, toward the mouth of the alley, like she expected something to come crawling out of the shadows any second. "The whole east wing is overrun. Security tried to contain it, but—" She stopped, swallowing hard. "They didn't make it."

I thought of Mia immediately — of her voice on that call, of the phone now sitting heavy in my pocket. If dozens of those things were loose inside Medifi, then whatever chance she had of surviving inside those walls was shrinking by the second.

"I need to get inside," I said, more to myself than to her.

Dr. Voss's eyes widened in something between disbelief and desperation. "Are you insane? You'll die in there."

"Maybe," I admitted, checking the magazine in my weapon out of habit more than necessity. "But my best friend might still be alive in there. And I'm not leaving her behind."