She started wrapping one end around one door handle. We got busy and detached the other end from the wall, then tied it across the wider hall to a twin set of double doors, with four doors now opened, two all the way. The darkened room across the hall looked to be a break or other administrative room. Most of the walkers followed the three of us in to it. They were harder to deal with when they were walking. I almost hoped they would walk right past us, and they did slightly, before letting their eyes adjust to the light.
The closest one near me nearly held me as I streaked past and fell over again on the alternately smooth and sticky floor surface. This time, he missed.

The doors closed upon the walkers, the patient whose bed they had detached and all but run us over with was reviving as the doctors and nurses brought them back to the original wall hookups, and there were about ten of us left outside with no real idea of what had just happened.
"Let's keep the door open," somebody said, probably me. My head was propped up near one of them.
"Yeah," Grapp seconded.
"They okay in there," she asked her friend.
"Oh yeah, the patients all felt better once they realized they had been merely comfortably resting and yet they would now be taken care of." Doctor Ribes said.
"What is going on now? With me? With you?" an ex-floored student asked around. She did not have the red eye-rims.
"Something is being spread," the doctor began. He sat down, and others slowly followed.
"By proximity to groups of half a dozen or more. It causes potential - I say potential - victims to - usually -" he looked in my general direction, eyes raising towards the ceiling "lose consciousness. I say potential because there have been no deaths," another look, this time at Grapp before, "few injuries," my turn, "and only one symptom of total affliction."
"Red eyes," supplied one guy whose contacts had come askew and was working on it.
"Now while they are unconscious, they usually," this time the Doctor kept looking in my direction, and almost met my eyes - I was getting nervous about my eyes by this time, "sleep. I am no expert on sleep, but often one of the side effects of an affliction the body can deal with one way or another is sleep. So far, everyone we know -" looking around again "who has slept has seemed to have recovered. We have even begun to sleep again and continued to be in recovery.
But the moment we are surrounded by red eye-rimmed walkers," the Doctor concluded, though of course it seemed like he was just starting, "the effects return, and we cannot be guaranteed of our safety."
"Here is what we do: first, we travel in groups that can resist their groups.
Second, we separate the afflicted from the most dedicated - " he gazed at those who had previously been attacking us unenthusiastically, "afflictors.
Third, and lastly, we attempt to find the circumstances in which either the affliction can be passed on, or cured, or if not cured, contained."
There was a long pause. Grapp broke it with: "Doc, one more thing."
"Yes, Grapp?"
"Here I go: what is it? How is it being made like this? What is new to cause this?"
"WIll it happen again?", the original "she" added.
"Why do I feel so happy when it happens?" I asked following up too.
"That last point, I believe, is one of the more interesting things about it all," the doctor said.

As we wandered the campus, locking up red-eyed usually-walkers who looked like people who had not slept since the invention of the zombie movie, who were often content to instead lie panting in the shade, while we walked out in the sun and began to stink at only 10 'o clock, I definitely knew who was smarter. Them versus us, they were former students and Professors, us (mostly) average or just the same, but hotter.
And yet the Doctor began to profess that he too had an idea of how this was working - inside us.
"See how the women love you?" He said to either Grapp or myself. "I used to think that was cute -" he finally had gotten a shirt so now the sweater was his pants, and his pirate hat was starting to provide his balding head some shade, "but then I saw them making moves at our mutual friend."
"They love everyone, and the men hold everyone." He had a point there. "Why would the men hold onto you men, when they could get women?"
"It is not strictly sexual. If nothing else, attraction would mean the occasional reversal." He took a swipe at one zombie impersonator with a tree limb we'd broken off for him.
"Oh sure, the action of them on their own is," swipe connect, "but it does not matter the target." Two of our growing group hauled away one of them to a bathroom we were using in this part of the campus - no emergency exits. "They do not even bother trying to get away," he added.
"They want to kill us with kindness," he waxed, "but we won't let 'em." Now this end of the main campus was completely safe until the heat lifted. "Meanwhile, all we can do is hope they get well. They obviously have a sleep-deprivation -related oxytocin imbalance."
"I got most of that," I said.
"Say what?" she #1 asked.
"Come again?" Grapp rounded off.
"They didn't sleep enough," he finished the thought, panting in the sun, hands reaching down for knees, "and now they are paying the price. Total infection with whatever flu-like condition this latest pandemic is, and if they are lucky, a long nap in each others' arms - hopefully not forever."
Oh shit, I thought.
"But they can be cured, right?" said one of the original zombie de-mythifiers. Thank gosh I didn't - I might have squeaked, unlike him, inappropriately to my age.
"Oxytocin is the most powerful thing short of pain transmission," the doctor answered behind a column, "in the brain. The brain makes it, it puts people to sleep, and they feel great when any of it is present. People can go for a week with no sleep, but in this condition - they might make it longer. They might actually die of thirst before then."
"But we're still eating and drinking," our main lady ejaculated quickly.
"Yes, you are, and I am too - but for how long? How long until the occasional late night at a bar, all-nighter, or day I say it, a rave? That graveyard shift of Brapp's well be his last."
"Ah, shit!"
When will it be safe to be in groups of strange people, I wanted to ask, to be alone or isolated from it all, either, to be anything but an average-size group? That was a toughie, though: there was little known immunity - those of us who incubated the disease before sleep ran a greater risk of afflicting others with it - and even sleep thereafter ran the chance of remission. Possibly especially around those we are attracted to most...
Yeah, I needed to insulate myself from women until this all blew over, or else stay with this - safe - crowd.
Insulate...
"Doc!" I shrieked. "It's insulation!"
"What the -" he began.
"It's in the air! It's the flu! We have to breathe it in in large quantities!"
I thought I heard several of the women intake their breath slightly at my enunciation. Jeez, just because I slow down in my delivery at the end they get their backs up..
Then the doctor: "But - okay - I suspected the same, but, a dosage of the disease? It almost sounds like some sort of agent, like a biochemical, like something related to the immune system but not actually a free-living bacterial, or even possibly viral, particle!"
"It can't be a prion..." he was muttering to himself.
"It's not a nanomachine, I read Prey," I said adding to myself: "so unrealistic."
"Pollution... chemical warfare? No, no known deaths," he continued.
"Pollution, herbicide and pesticide?" asked the woman I could not always keep my eyes off of.
"Synthetic immune agent? One which weakens pests' behavior by making them too happy to be anything but like pets?"
"Like dogs?" several people, including Grapp said, as we were all in the shade it was hard to tell.
"Whatever it is, it is a new effect, one which swamps the immune system with feelings of illness, simultaneously producing extra oxytocin and turning off any related emotional response to either."
Which was weird, because just as my sensations had been telling me to touch people, my emotions had been telling me to stop. My feelings drove the sensations away, just like the pain had been a physical feeling driving me. Just like their worry for me had made them drive me here...
It was all just one big circle of life. And it had beaten our own self-created Frankenstein monster. Now we could all be independent, and have lives, and names, such as mine was....