got below 104 despite the environmental cold and lack of any other vitality in the vital signs. His brain was cooked. He was dead.”
“All the way dead?” Hoffman asked “I mean, there’s no chance he was kind of almost dead, and putting him in the refrigerated drawer in the morgue might have put him in hibernation or something?”
Bright wanted to roll her eyes in disbelief, but, clearly, something had gone wrong and Hristo Gruev hadn’t died. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of something like this happening, but there’s a first time for everything.”
Hoffman stepped up to the glass and leaned close to it, staring through it at the man strapped to the bed, blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth, his fingers clawing at the sheets.
“What does he have? Rabies?” Hoffman asked. “Would that make him attack people like that?”
“I don’t think so,” Bright said. “Some of the symptoms are similar: fever, twitching, the strange breathing pattern. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of blood loss like this.”
“Couldn’t that maybe be the foaming at the mouth you hear about?”
Bright shook her head. “No, but I’m going to test for it, anyway. Something’s wrong with him.”
“So, what do we do with the rest of the people who’ve come in contact with him?” Hoffman asked. “I’ve got a dozen people who’ve been waiting in an airport conference room since yesterday afternoon and I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold them there much longer.”
“We're going to hold them another twenty-four hours. If they don't exhibit any symptoms, they should be okay,” Bright said. “We’ll want to notify this guy’s wife we’ve got him here and bring her in so we can get the required authorizations for treatment, but the rest can go to Disneyland if nobody gets sick.”
“What about the people he came in contact with here?”
Bright poured a cup of coffee from the pot in the observation room, added some Coffee Mate to it and swirled it into a tan color. She sipped and thought.
“We’ve got the two injured men in separate rooms, under observation with guards outside their rooms to prevent accidental exposures to unauthorized people, so we should be okay on that account,” Bright said, walking up to the wall alongside Hoffman. “The other man, Marcus Glass, died from his wounds. His body was transferred to a funeral home about an hour ago. I met his parents and explained what happened, as best I could, but they couldn't believe we thought Gruev was dead."
Bright took a sip of coffee and considered the situation, turned her head to Hoffman and sniffed out a tiny laugh, “I’m sure someone will get sued because of this.”
Get the entire collection of 20 stories - Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse
About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.
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