Adam Murray

SO he hadn't exactly told Stacie the truth. Not all of it at least. Nurse Herrick had actually been a little more specific--one of the patients in the ER had apparently injured some people and hospital security was involved. She'd also told Adam to stay in the room and keep the door locked, and as soon as he got back with the ice chips, he planned to do just that.

But Stacie didn't need to know the details. She had plenty on her mind.

He was so proud of her for wanting a natural childbirth. Not that it mattered to him one way or the other, but he thought it showed real bravery on Stacie's part.

He'd been teary all day thinking about holding his son (or daughter--they'd chosen not to know the sex beforehand) for the first time.

After blowing Stacie a kiss, he closed the door to their room and started down the corridor.

Quiet up here on the third floor in this nine-bed maternity ward, and aside from the door to their room, only one other was closed.

He passed the first, heard a woman moaning inside.

The nurses' station stood vacant.

Adam took a wrong turn down a short hallway that dead-ended at the OR. The doors were closed, windows dark.

The hall on the other side of the nurses' station led to a nursery, and across from it, a waiting room and a kitchen.

Both empty.

Adam walked into the kitchen, searched the cabinets until he came to a stack of plastic buckets.

The ice machine hummed in the corner.

As he filled the bucket, he thought he heard those distant pops again over the racket of the falling ice, several floors below.

Back out in the hall, Adam stopped at the big window and peered into the nursery.

Low lit.

None of the glass isolettes was occupied.

His son or daughter would be in there soon.

The doors to the maternity wing swung open and footsteps padded quickly down the hall.

Nurse Herrick emerged around the corner. She was a cute, petite, thirty-something blonde, bit of a cowgirl twang in her voice. He thought he'd seen her at his church before with a seven or eight-year-old boy, but he couldn't be sure.

Adam called out to her.

She stopped and looked at him.

Something was wrong, very wrong--he could see it in her sheet-white face long before he was close enough to notice the speckles of blood that dotted her pink scrubs.

When he reached her, he put a hand on her shoulder--couldn't help himself, comforting was engrained into his nature.

"Carla, what's wrong?"

She shook her head, tears welling.

The ice cracked and settled in his bucket.

"There's been...some kind of outbreak," she said softly, almost too evenly. "It started in the ER, and it's spreading. Fast."

"What do you mean, 'outbreak?'"

She finally met his eyes, and in them, he glimpsed real fear. "People are changing. They're killing each other."

"Where's hospital security?"

"Dead."

Adam quickly turned around. "I have to get Stacie out of here."

He started down the corridor, but Herrick grabbed his arm and pointed back toward the thick, automatic doors she'd just come though, thirty feet beyond the nurses' station.

"That's the only way out, Pastor. You need to understand--the other nurses tried to leave." Her bottom lip quivered. "They didn't make it. I didn't come back up here to help you and Stacie escape. I came back to lock you in, because that's the only chance we have."