The Rot: Book 2

Chapter 2

I had to hurry away from the entrance to the clinic. I didn't want any stenches wandering in and taking a bite out of my back. Walking through the lobby, I saw that the place was just trashed. It looked like whoever was in here at the start of this crap tried in vain to barricade the front doors. Didn't work.

With the front doors broken down, somebody, probably the clinic staff, tried to barricade the doorway behind the front desk by piling up a bunch of file cabinets. That too, didn't work. There was a large, dried up blood stain on the front desk, but there were no bodies around. Not only that, I didn't hear any stenches, or smell them. I couldn't necessarily call out and see what was lurking inside the clinic as I couldn't risk the eaters outside hearing me.

I stepped over the makeshift file cabinet barricade and was standing in a narrow hallway with rooms on both sides of me. I stood there a moment and listened for the corpses, but the entire building seemed pretty quiet. Using the butt of my axe handle, I slammed it down on the carpeted floor a few times, trying to draw out any dead things, but nothing came out of the rooms. I didn't feel like I was far enough away from the entrance to call out, so I walked down the hallway, being careful to check out each room as I walked past.

The rooms looked like small hospital rooms that were in varying degrees of disarray. The last room on the left was the absolute worst. The bed in the center of the room was covered with blood stained sheets and there were bloody hand prints all over the walls. There were even a few shell casings on the ground near the doorway.

"What in the hell happened in here?" I wondered.

At the end of the hallway was a stairwell that only went up. I hoped that the upstairs is where they kept the medical supplies because I sure as hell didn't find anything on the main floor worth using.

I walked up the staircase, being as quiet as I could be. The carpeted stairs muffled my footsteps rather nicely so anything that could be up there waiting for me, didn't hear my approach.

When I reached the last step, I came to a doorway and what was left of the door. The top half of the door looked like it had been blown away with a shotgun, and only the lower half remained. The keypad to the left of the door was also torn out of the wall and lay shattered on the ground. I would have just tried knocking myself, but that's just me.

I figured that's where the clinic kept their supplies, and sure enough, I was right. Rows of shelves lined the entire room.

I let out a relieved sigh, "Good." It was time to do a little bit of shopping, and I immediately started to search for cough medicine and antibiotics.

"Cough medicine, cough medicine, where are you?" I muttered as my head darted from shelf to shelf. "You gotta be around here somewhere."

Granted, the room had been ransacked, and the items on the shelves looked to be pretty picked over, but I knew that there just had to be something leftover I could take back to the girls. There just had to be.

The last shelf on the aisle had a few bottles of antibiotics that I hurriedly tossed into the backpack. Now that I got those out of the way, I had to get the cough medicine for Cynthia and the bandages for Ang. I doubt there were any painkillers around. Shit, I bet those were the first thing to go when the undead apocalypse started.

The next aisle was pretty sparse, but I did load up on a few more bottles of aspirin that were lying on the floor. When I walked into the third and final aisle, that's when I saw the shadow move across from one end of the room towards the door.

"Reid, you dumb bastard," I thought to myself once I realized I forgot to call out to any stenches inside the room. But the shadowy figure didn't move like one of the eaters. It moved like someone normal.