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first.
Besides, I doubt that anybody needs a secretary right now.”
    Her eyes suddenly grew large as she gaped at something over Keith’s shoulder.
    Keith turned to find himself looking at a mutilated man in bloodstained coveralls.
Keith thought that it might be Al from maintenance, but it was hard to tell
with half of the man’s face missing.
    “Damn,” Keith said, ducking when Al tried to grab him. He saw a second form shuffling
down the hall, a low moan echoing off the walls as it grew closer. Looking
around as he evaded Al’s attempts to grasp him, Keith grabbed a crutch that was
leaning against the wall, wishing he had a better weapon.
    “Back off, buddy,” he warned, brandishing the crutch. “I’m not kidding.”
    When the warning went unheeded, he swung the crutch hard. Al grabbed for him again,
opening his mouth to expose bloodstained teeth.
    They struggled for a moment until Keith was able to shove his attacker back against
the wall, hard enough that it should have stunned him, but there was no
reaction. Instead, the former maintenance man lurched forward again. All the
while the second man was getting closer.
    “Here,” a female voice said, shoving a .357 Magnum into Keith’s hand.
    He blinked in surprise but there was no time for questions. He tossed the bent crutch aside.
    “Last warning. Stop right now or I’m shooting,” Keith said, hoping the threat would
be enough. The vivid memories from the incident in room 329 made him realize
that one of them was probably going to die. He decided that it would be the
other guy. When the ghoul went to grab him, Keith put a hole through Al’s eye,
or where he assumed the eye used to be. After the body dropped to the floor
with a thud, Keith turned to find Marla, who was also an RN, standing behind
him. The secretary was long gone.
    “Your gun?” he asked, trying to stay calm as he watched the second man lumbering toward him.
    “Sure is,” Marla smiled. She was sipping a soda from the cafeteria. “Stan, I mean Mr.
Paulson, just gave it to me before he left. He said he wanted me to be able to protect myself.”
    Keith shook his head. Stan Paulson was the hospital administrator. Now he understood
how Marla kept her job, since it certainly wasn’t due to her nursing skills. He
turned his attention back to the man that was still coming down the hallway.
This one was walking slower, probably because his foot was twisted almost
backward. Most of his throat was ripped out and Keith knew that, like the
visitor who had been attacked upstairs, this man couldn’t possibly still be
alive. That made it a little easier to pull the trigger. The force of the
bullet caused the body to jerk backwards as a hole appeared on the man’s shirt,
directly over the heart. When the walking corpse regained his balance and kept
coming forward, Keith muttered, “Impossible.” After what he’d already seen, he
wasn’t sure why this surprised him. He aimed higher this time and succeeded
with a shot to the forehead that dropped the man to the ground.
    Glancing around to make sure there were no others, he took a deep breath to calm himself.
    “So is everything all right in the cafeteria?” he asked Marla who didn’t seem
overly concerned over the bizarre happenings.
    “No, there was some kind of a food fight so I left,” she said, wiping at a spot of
red on her scrubs. “Look at this. I even got ketchup on me.”
    It looked like blood to Keith, but he really didn’t have time to argue about it.
    “I think we need to get back upstairs,” he said when a scream of terror came from
the direction of the ER. “We need to check the patients and lock the floor down.”
    ~*~
    “The head, Jack, shoot them in the head!” Eric screamed.
    Jack shot one of the attackers in the back of the head, dropping him immediately. He
dropped the others with a single shot each, allowing Eric to escape.
    Eric ran past Jack, who was still shooting.
    “Jack, they’re everywhere. C’mon, let’s