Gravewalkers: Dying Time (28 page)

The knowledge that Carmen
was with him filled Critias with a twinge of choler. The ghoul had
really come up the stairs with the desire to hunt them down then
kill them, or so at least he told himself it was that personal. He
advanced with kicks through the trash that littered the hallway.
Critias intended to scatter it to draw the attention of the ghoul,
but the creature still just ignored him. He kept on with increased
rancor until his boot-shuffle of the debris sent a rat to flight
down the hallway.

The ghoul zeroed in on the
rodent then dashed after it low to the ground. So pursued, the
terrified rat reversed its course to run right between Critias’
legs with the ghoul close behind. When the infected was right at
Critias’ feet, it stared up at him through his visor then realized
its previous error, which caused the thing’s face to twist into a
bared-teeth snarl.

As he slapped his open
gauntlet down onto the ghoul’s head, Critias had a genuine need to
see the creature suffer for affronting him with its wretched
existence. His enhanced strength fortified the blow that shattered
the creature’s skull like a glass jar inside a leather sack, which
left the ghoul crumpled motionless at his feet. He didn’t check to
see if Carmen still followed. Critias just headed for the stairwell
the ghoul came from then proceeded down to see how far they could
get before having to turn back.

Four floors down, they
paused at a landing to examine a skeleton with a rusty pistol
between the leg bones and a bullet-hole through its skull. Carmen
made a forensic paleontological evaluation of the skeleton as she
nudged the ruined pistol with her foot, “This is a Caucasian male,
approximately thirty-five years of age with one self-inflicted
thirty-two caliber gunshot wound to the head.”

“
Looks like he got himself
chomped on back in the day,” Critias reasoned, “then he elected for
suicide rather than turning.”

"That is essentially the
truth of it," Carmen agreed with only small reservations. "I notice
that the skeleton's hand is missing the tip of its left index
finger. Close examination suggests to me that this maiming is the
result of a bullet from his gun rather than from the bite of a
ghoul."

Critias extended one arm in
a motion that pretended to push away an angry ghoul by having his
hand in its gnashing face. At the same time, he went through the
motion of his other hand to fire an imaginary pistol into the
ghoul's skull. Critias commented on the man's hapless fate, "He
could have easily acquired some other bites and scratches when
wrestling around with an angry ghoul. If he did shoot his own
finger off, he followed up by plunging the newly trimmed stub into
a ghoul's facial bullet wound."

Carmen nodded to that
reasoning, "He never turned, so he must have killed himself quite
soon after the event that would have infected him had he
lived."

As they continued down the
concrete steps, they encountered a badly dehydrated female corpse
sprawled out where it had fallen headshot some years past only to
remain ghoulishly free of decomposition. Even though it was obvious
to both of them, Critias took the time to say, “This must be the
one that ended up with that guy’s finger in her brains.”

Critias and Carmen
eventually descended down so many stairs that they reached street
level, all without ghoulish opposition, to then exit out of the
stairwell through an already-open fire door. That ground floor was
the entry lobby for the office building as a whole. In addition to
multiple sets of main doors that connected directly out to the
sidewalk, there were some small stores and a sandwich shop as
obvious locations of interest.

As Critias zombie-walked to
the food service area to check for canned food, he noticed the
freshly slain half-eaten carcass of a mature whitetail deer that
lay in the middle of the hall near the south doors to the outside.
Those doors not only stood wide open, they were missing entirely.
Critias knew enough about predators and their kills to realize that
whatever had feasted on the deer wouldn’t be far away, so he just
stood still and listened quietly.

Carmen whispered through
her internal transmitter to radio his helmet, “Be careful. There
was a zoological park in this city and that carcass seems as though
it was predated by a large mammal to me.”

He asked, “You mean like
lions, tigers, and bears?”

“
That’s exactly what I
mean,” she confirmed the warning, “and I don’t think we want to
test your armor against a four-hundred kilogram tiger.”

Her logic seemed reasonable
enough to Critias in that he never heard of infected abandoning a
freshly killed carcass before. While it was possible that the ghoul
that had killed the animal had already eaten to the point of losing
interest, that didn’t explain why other ghouls hadn’t moved in to
scavenge on the remainder.

A scraping sound alerted
them to a crawler before they saw the creature drag itself in from
the street a moment later. It audibly sniffed as it tracked the
stench of the deer’s spilled entrails that were strong on the air.
When the creature saw the carcass, the crawler impressively
accelerated its legless torso to set upon the deer corpse to begin
tearing at the raw flesh with its feeble teeth that no amount of
savagery could make efficient for such a task better suited to less
unnatural carnivores.

Critias kept still as he
watched and waited to see if some greater predator would appear to
defend its food. The thing that came didn’t disappoint him. With
the agility of the tiger that Carmen first feared, the largest
hunter that Critias had ever seen leaped out from a nearby
stationery store. The fearsome giant bellowed rage as it pounced on
the interloping crawler. Critias imagined that in some former life,
the hunter had been a showman like a strongman in a circus, for he
could think of no other explanation for how the man could have
grown into such a colossus even with an infected’s healing-factor
run wild. If the thing ever stood fully erect, the hunter would
have been more than a full meter taller than Critias. Also unlike
any other hunter that Critias had ever encountered, the beast
remained a perfectly proportioned Hercules as though having never
suffered any catastrophic injury at all to trigger the regenerative
condition. The monstrosity had simply grown bigger and more
mesomorphic with the passage of time. The thing was awe-inspiring,
a paragon of flawless flesh devoid of scar or blemish, a veritable
titan bestride the Earth. Goliath himself would have gazed up to
tremble in the face of a true biblical demigod of destruction, a
super hunter only rumored about in disbelieved Forager legend, a
destroyer.

That ultimate hunter
casually snatched up the puny crawler, snapped its spine like it
had wringed a towel, and then flung it out the door to bounce and
skip before it ended up in the middle of the street where it
squealed and twitched. Having reclaimed his food, the destroyer
glanced about to see if any other ghouls were foolish enough to
challenge him for the meal; that is when the destroyer spotted
Critias who stood silently across the lobby.

“
Grendel,” Carmen named
her dread to him by radio. “Run, Critias! If you die here,
everything that is our future will be undone!”

That king among hunters
charged with another of its angry roars that was clear in any
language. Grendel wasn’t interested in food or in defending it. It
only cared about crushing a trespassing rival and that mammoth
beast moved at least as fast as they could plus it was
fantastically stronger.

Critias already sensed that
Carmen would sacrifice herself so that he might escape. If they
both ran together, Grendel would catch them. If they outran him,
the hunter would follow them and then easily make the same jump
back to the Customs House. Critias had often desired to catch
Carmen making a mistake, but that long awaited victory was ashes in
his mouth. It was his own decision to lead them down the building
rather than up, as he had known was the wiser course of action. The
fault for their blunder in judgment was entirely his
own.

Even before Carmen had
finished speaking, Critias instinctively drew his pistol then fired
a shot. Because he had dialed down the power of his weapon, the
bullet exited his pistol with almost complete silence, which proved
to be yet another item on his growing list of miscalculations. The
tungsten projectile struck the hunter square in the forehead only
to bounce off thick bone to leave only an insignificant flesh
wound.

Grendel was too fast to
suffer another bullet as he loped forward in only two bounds. He
added that momentum into an openhanded pankration slap that caught
Critias in the chest to send him whirling airborne across the
lobby.

Critias crashed
uncontrollably into a marble wall that was more than solid enough
to take the impact without a quiver and then he had to fall two
meters just to hit the floor, mostly with his head. The initial
contact with the wall had already knocked him senseless so that the
crash to the floor actually served to bring him back to
consciousness. His first breath felt like he inhaled flame and to
top it all off, his pistol had flown from his hand to he knew not
where.

Carmen spun the velocity
setting of her teslaflux pistol up to its maximum then gripped it
in both hands on braced legs to unleash its wrath. The recoil was
so fierce that it launched her backward to plow through a man-sized
decorative ceramic vase. Her bullet struck Grendel through the
thick muscle near his shoulder just as he leaped to finish off
Critias. The hypersonic projectile transferred so much kinetic
energy on impact that it tore off the whole arm at the socket and
knocked Grendel flat. The round then continued through walls for
another half kilometer.

Sight of the panga-bowie
sword that Carmen had strapped to his right shin brought Critias
back to his senses. She had added the sheath to his armor so that
she could camouflage paint them together. He heard her pistol
report go off like a bomb and then watched the destroyer collapse
from a brutal blood fountain of a wound. Critias pulled his sword
as the motion-processor Kevin upgraded hopped him from his back to
his feet with acrobatic agility, much to Critias’ amazed
gratitude.

Carmen tossed aside her
uselessly overheated handgun then dashed over to stomp out the
hunter’s brains before he could recover. As she came down from a
jump to plant both feet on the back of his neck, Grendel sprang up
to administer a punishing backhand with his remaining arm that
batted her from the air like a shuttlecock. The blow sent Carmen
flying far down the lobby to then slide even further along the
dusty floor.

Critias saw his pistol
nearby so he leaped for it while he threw his sword to slide down
the floor to Carmen who could undoubtedly make better use of it
than he could. He reached the handgun just as the hunter reached
him. The ogreish infected seized Critias by an ankle then used that
grip to whip him headlong into the stationery store to crash
through several layers of shelving displays that then collapsed on
top of him.

The feeding shrieks of
ghouls chorused outside in the street in answer to Carmen’s loud
gunshot. The sounds meant that lesser infected were on their way to
join the fight.

Critias shoved his way out
of the storefront wreckage with pistol in hand set for firepower.
He absently headshot the first three runners as they came in
through the doorway then he ran to join up with Carmen who faced
down their real nemesis.

She taunted, slashed, and
stabbed at Grendel like a clever matador in a daring duel with an
enraged bull. Grendel soaked up the trifling picador wounds with
furious resilience while he retaliated with clubbing blows from his
single arm that hoped she would fail in one of her artful
dodges.

Critias pumped slugs into
Grendel's hunched-over back on the off chance that one of them
would pass through far enough to hit something vital, preferably
the destroyer’s enormous head. Desperate hope was not enough to get
Critias a killing injury and as it was, the damage he inflicted was
not even sufficient to interrupt the brute's interest to smash
Carmen.

When her sword finally
snagged in Grendel’s sinewy tissue, the hunter caught Carmen by the
calf then twirled his whole mass to lash her bodily across a major
support pillar. The impact shattered ceramic tile to bits and
caused dust to fall down from the high ceiling. That wasn't enough,
so Grendel reversed his swing to fling her across the lobby where
she smashed badly into the marble wall that had previously shown so
little mercy to Critias.

Desperate to survive,
Critias loaded a fresh clip then promptly emptied it into a new
wave of runners as they streamed in from the street by two
different entrances. He masterfully cut them down like so many clay
pigeons. His next clip after that was for the destroyer-class
hunter, but when Critias turned around to engage him, he discovered
that Grendel was already gone. The giant had inexplicably fled the
confrontation that he had been well on the way to
winning.

With sword in hand, Carmen
tragically struggled to regain her feet on a crippled leg. She
moved like a dog hit by a car. The rest of her seemed merely badly
battered since her sturdy titanium bones had taken the abuse while
remaining unbroken.