The first thing to greet me at the hospital doors was a disfigured walker, moving faster than I expected. I slammed my knife into its head, and its body hit the ground with a loud thump. That was a mistake. Five more walkers rounded the corner, drawn by the noise.
This time I changed tactics. I swept the first one's knee out from under it, and as it fell, it knocked the others off balance. I closed the gap in a sprint and finished them one by one, a stab here, a stomp there, until the lobby went quiet. I'd learned something important: noise is as dangerous as any bite.
I found a map of the hospital by the front desk. The place was huge, with winding corridors, and every corner was dark. The smartest first move was the power room, to get the backup generator running. According to the map, it was down the left hallway, past three rooms.
I crept down the hall and checked each room through its small window. One walker stood near the door of the first, with two more farther down. I eased the door open and killed the nearest from behind, lowering its body to the floor so it wouldn't make a sound. The others fell to the same trick, one after another.
The power room door was unlocked. Inside, one walker wandered near the generator switches and another stood in the middle of the room. I took them out as silently as I had the rest, then threw the main switch. The lights flickered to life, and I closed my eyes against the sudden glare.
When I went back to the lobby, the squad was waiting where I had left them to guard the front door. They sprang up when they saw me and tumbled over each other to reach me, and I hugged them one by one, rubbing their ears and necks. Then I led them down the hall to look for Rick's room.
It took days. The hospital was full of walkers, and I had to clear it floor by floor. Eventually I reached the cafeteria, where I took a break to rest and feed the squad treats I'd bought from the system store at five Z coins a bag.
By now I had a decent understanding of the system. It worked like a video game. It showed my stats, and the stats of other people. It held my inventory and a store. I told it to bring up my status.
System: Host, here is your status.
Stats run from 1 to 20. Ten is the limit for a normal human. Anything from 11 to 20 is beyond human.
Name: Jake Life: 20/20 | Strength: 18/20 | Stamina: 17/20 | Agility: 15/20 Skills: Martial Arts Mastery, Hand-to-Hand Combat Mastery, Knife Combat Mastery, Training Mastery, Leadership (Advanced), Strategy Mastery, Taming Mastery, Building (Advanced), Teaching (Advanced)
Most of it made sense. Taming Mastery surprised me. It let me read my squad's stats and feelings, and even communicate with them. Here's what they looked like:
Fenrir (dark fur, little red eyes) Life: 10/20 | Strength: 10/20 | Stamina: 12/20 | Agility: 11/20 Skills: Claw, Bite
Thor (lightning-like fur, light blue eyes) Life: 10/20 | Strength: 12/20 | Stamina: 11/20 | Agility: 10/20 Skills: Claw, Bite
Rex (light gray fur, light dark eyes) Life: 10/20 | Strength: 12/20 | Stamina: 11/20 | Agility: 10/20 Skills: Claw, Bite
Dawn (yellow fur with a blue mix, light green eyes) Life: 20/20 | Strength: 15/20 | Stamina: 14/20 | Agility: 11/20 Skills: Claw, Bite
I looked at the four of them, curled up together on the cafeteria floor. They were no longer just pets. They were my pack, and I wasn't going to let anything happen to them.
Then I opened the store and checked my wallet. It was the one screen that made me nervous.
Wallet: 372 Z coins
Income: Every zombie drops 1 Z coin. About 1 in 10 also drops a ration, like bread or water. Kills by me or my pack count.
Prices (fixed): Ration, 1 coin. Dog treats, 5 coins. Ammo box (50 rounds), 10 coins. Weapon repair, 20 coins. Nerfed super soldier dose, 90 coins. NPC pack, 500 coins, and a territory is required.
Rules: No credit. Z coins can't be traded for bank money, and bank money can't buy anything from the store.
The numbers were small, and none of it was a gift. Every coin was a dead walker, and everything worth having cost a lot of them. If I wanted to keep my gear working and my squad strong, I couldn't waste a single coin.
But Rick was still somewhere in this building, and I wasn't going to find him by sitting here. I stood up, and the squad followed.
Rose
Rick's room was one corridor away from a hallway where someone had sealed in a crowd of walkers. A warning was scrawled across the double doors: DON'T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE. I kept well clear of it. Rick's own door was heavily fortified from the inside with furniture and random junk, and now that the hallways were secure, I cleared it all away and went in.
I had spent months imagining this moment, and it was a letdown. The man in the bed was scrawny and pale, nothing like the hero from the show. In the panic, no one had given him the supplements he needed to stay alive.
I left the squad in his room to guard him and went to scavenge. The hospital had been spared by looters because no one wanted to fight through that many walkers, so the shelves were full. As I searched, I remembered a group of bikers in Atlanta who were looking after elderly people who needed medicine. They had only one rule: survive. I didn't want to take all of the medicine for myself. I decided to bring some to them and earn their trust. It was better than leaving them to be picked off by other survivors, and I would rather have them in my group than not.
I was heading toward the cafeteria when I heard gunshots. They came from a building just across the street, and through the windows I could see soldiers firing at walkers below. I eased open the exit door, checked the corner, and crossed the street slowly.
I was nearly at the door when an explosion tore through one of the top floors. I dove to the side as debris rained down, then looked up at a cloud of dust pouring out of a shattered window where the soldiers had been. I ran inside.
Two walkers stumbled toward me in the lobby, one behind the other. I kicked the front one's knee out from under it and drove my knife into the head of the second, then finished the first on the floor. I wiped the blade on a dead man's shirt and moved to the stairs.
I fixed the knife to the end of my rifle, switched on my flashlight, and climbed one careful step at a time. I remembered the soldiers being on the fifth floor, and I cleared walkers with clean headshots as I climbed. On the third floor, a clump of walkers was pounding on a door. I could hear someone crying behind it.
I shot eight or ten of them before they knew I was there. Then I knocked three times.
"It's safe now," I said. "You can open the door."
The voice on the other side didn't trust me. "Who are you? Where are the military uncles and aunt?"
I guessed she meant the soldiers I'd seen from the hospital. I told her they were on the fifth floor, and that I had come over when I saw them fighting.
I'll admit I was desperate to talk to someone besides my dogs. The door finally opened, and I found a girl about four years younger than me. I asked if she'd been bitten, and she looked confused, so I rephrased: had any of the weird-acting people touched her? She said no. I opened her status through the system to check, and it matched. She was telling the truth.
I gave her water and bread from my inventory. While she ate, she told me her name was Rose. Her family had come to the hospital for her checkup because she'd been feeling sick.
"It started with the patients," she said. "They were bloody, so many of them. One attacked a doctor and started biting people. My dad told me the military uncles and aunts were there to keep us safe."
She took a breath.
"One of the aunts saved us. She told me everything would be back to normal when I woke up, and I fell asleep. But when I woke up, Mom was bitten, and Dad was hitting her with a chair. The aunt burst in and shot two of them. Then she bent down to check on my mom, and Mom bit her neck."
Rose's voice shook.
"Dad shot Mom, and he was crying, but more of them kept coming. His gun clicked empty. He hit them with the butt of it, but there were too many, and they bit him. He told me to run."
She had run until she found the soldiers on another floor, but they were fighting too. So she locked herself in the room where I'd found her. Walkers heard her in the morning, and they'd been banging on the door ever since.
The fifth floor had gone quiet. With a scared kid beside me and the sun going down, going up there wasn't smart. I took Rose's hand and led her down to the ground floor.
Back in Rick's room, she was scared of the dogs at first. They won her over in minutes with nothing more than being adorable. While she played with them, I found the supplement Rick needed and hooked it up. After dark, I barricaded the door and lay down next to Thor, Rex and Dawn, while Fenrir was hugged half to death by Rose as she slept beside him.