Last Hope, Book One: Onslaught (24 page)

“They risked their lives to save you, Jack,” Juliette said from across the room.

Jack turned his head to the familiar voice, as if noticing Juliette for the first time. “No one asked them to,” he answered, reaching the door and shutting it. “You,” he called to the woman with short hair, “move that cooker here.”

Jack’s voice trailed off as the cold blade of Frank’s knife touched his neck. The hotel worker had come from behind him, stepping forward unnoticed.

The group watched silently.

“You either back off, or I’ll kill you,” Frank explained. He flicked the knife up and knocked the sunglasses from Jack’s face so that they fell to the tiled floor. The knife was back against Jack’s neck in an instant. “No one is left to die. You understand?”

“Yes,” Jack hissed.

Frank lowered the knife and gave Jack a shove in his back, sending him reeling away. The hotel worker then raised his foot and deliberately stamped on the sunglasses, breaking them apart. He ground the shattered lenses against the tiles with the sole of his shoe. Jack stumbled over to lean against the wall, cursing quietly.

The two blonde women went straight to his aid.

Andy and Sam came through the door from the offices. The maintenance man’s hammer was back on his tool-belt and he was clutching his set of keys; one of them already singled out between his thumb and forefinger. He gave the bunch to Frank. “We got a filing cabinet across t’door. In thirty seconds, Carl an’ t’other guy are going to make a run for it. Once they’re in, lock this door.”

Frank nodded at his instructions but Andy was already on the move. He and Sam ran off towards the restaurant. They’d barely reached the swing-doors when a shout of warning echoed out from the offices. The voice was unmistakably Carl’s, powerful and strong, but it was also brimming with fear.

Standing with the door open, Frank waited.

All he could see was the small room inside, with its desk and empty first-aid cabinet, but not down the corridor from where the last two men would arrive. Nevertheless, he could hear their approaching feet, and beyond them the terror-inducing sound of splintering wood.

A man with brown corduroy pants and a checkered shirt burst around the corner. He looked as if he was going to keep running up the next corridor until Frank shouted for his attention, drawing the man to his voice. The man threw himself through the door and his thin glasses dropped from his face.

Frank waited a fraction of a second, but there was no sign of Carl. He turned to the man in the checkered shirt. “Where’s Carl?”

The man didn’t answer; he simply searched the floor for his spectacles, frantically patting his hands down on the cold tiles.

“Where’s Carl?” Frank asked again, this time stepping away from the door to land a gentle kick on the other man’s leg, trying to make him respond.

From Budd’s position halfway across the kitchen, where he was working his way back from the freight elevator, he realized what could happen and shouted a warning.

It was too late.

Frank darted back to the door to try and close it, but already the beasts were there. The first one squeezed its way through the doorway and dived upon the man in the checkered shirt.

There was a scream as the beast tore at his body.

Frank plunged his knife into the back of the beast; a female dressed in the mauve suit of the hotel staff. She howled and released her grip, but already two more of the fast-movers were through the door.

Frank was bundled to the ground.

Screams of fear erupted around the kitchen as all of those who could raced towards the line of swing-doors. No one chose to offer any resistance to the fast-movers rushing inwards.

Budd waited until Juliette reached him and then together they ran down one of the central paths between the worktops.

Behind them, the beasts were clambering over other work surfaces, fanning out across the kitchen. In the corner of this eye, Budd watched the middle-aged woman from the landing stumble and fall from view beneath one of the counters, her sense of balance lost to her fright. Before she could get back up, several of the beasts had leapt on top of her. They extracted chilling screams from her body.

Budd and Juliette launched themselves through a gap in the hotplate at the edge of the kitchen. He pushed open the nearest swing-door and let Juliette pass through ahead of him. Glancing back across the kitchen, it dawned on him that the axe had slipped from his hand.

Not that it mattered.

One look at the snarling, bloodthirsty horde convinced me that the usefulness of the axe had long gone. There were no more of the slow-moving, easily killed zombies we’d first encountered. Now they were all fast and powerful, relentless in their desire to kill and, I saw, eat the living.

They couldn’t be fought. Even one would pose a danger to a group of armed men, and so the only thing left to do was run. Nowhere was safe…

Not everyone had yet reached the edge of the kitchen; Father McGee, Reginald and Caroline, as well as the woman with short hair and her companion, were still running for the doors, searching for routes that kept them away from the swarm of beasts that was cascading into the room.

Blood shot into the air where Frank and the man in the checkered shirt had fallen, and Budd saw the shoeless foot of the middle-aged woman tossed up to land on a worktop. One of the attackers, a little girl of perhaps eight or nine years of age dressed in pink pajamas with her hair in bunches, jumped onto the counter and tore at the severed foot with her teeth.

The sight brought vomit up into Budd’s mouth. Some of the fast-movers were giving chase, skirting those already on the floor and heading straight for the restaurant.

He followed Juliette out the swing-door.

There was very little time.

There were screams and shouts, but despite it all Budd could see that Andy and Sam were working as quickly as they could, resistant to the panic that had contaminated the rest of the group. The two of them pulled down the last nailed-up tabletop and then Andy grabbed the door handle. He turned around and let his eyes dart from person to person. “Where’s Frank?” he asked.

“Dead, boss.”

“Damn it,” Andy cursed, and then he struck the handle with his hammer.

Beside the maintenance man, Sam cast his eye for something heavier. Hidden behind a small wooden door, built into an alcove in the wall, was a fire extinguisher. The young Californian took the red cylinder, turned it on its side, and used it like a battering ram, aiming at the lock in the center of the two doors. The wood groaned under the impacts. Andy added his own strength to the blows. Finally, the lock and handle mechanisms cracked apart and the doors swung inward to reveal the unlit foyer of the elevator bank.

A crash at the swing-doors heralded the arrival of the first fast-mover from the kitchen. It skidded to the floor in a whirl of thrashing limbs and then snapped back up to its feet. The whole group of survivors tried to squeeze through the double doors at once.

No one was prepared to stay and fight.

Budd was no different, and with Juliette’s hand clutched inside his own he pushed his way into the darkness, indifferent to the plight of anyone in his way.

Women and children first? Only if they can run faster than me…

He reached the call button and pressed it hard, several times, almost as if the electronics might pick up on his need and respond quicker. As soon as he heard one of the elevators moving, he looked back to the doorway.

Most of the group was inside the foyer, standing by the elevators.

The first fast-mover was now on top of one of Jack’s female companions, the blonde in the black dress. She was pinned down on the restaurant side of the double doors, while the beast, a weedy-looking male wearing a pair of blue jeans and no top, was trying to bite her, bending his head down towards her face.

Fear gave her strength and she kept her arms straight, holding her attacker off as she screamed for help.

The fast-mover snarled and snapped his teeth in frustration.

The blonde woman began to weaken.

“Scarlet,” Jack shouted, charging from the group. He planted a kick into the beast’s upper chest but it did nothing to free the trapped woman; the man-beast merely looked up from his prey to his new aggressor. He hissed through bloodstained teeth.

Sam followed Jack, his carving knife pointed at the shirtless male. He rammed the blade down, plunging it into the man-beast’s neck until it reached the handle and stopped. The tip of the blade had burst out the other side.

The man-beast shot to his feet and scratched at the lodged knife. Blood spilled down his naked chest and he howled in pain.

Jack dragged Scarlet into the elevator foyer. Blood covered her made-up face and a flap of skin hung from her cheek, torn away from beneath her eye.

Above Budd, a bell chimed and one set of the elevator doors slid open. He pulled Juliette inside.

In the restaurant, the man-beast disregarded the weapon that skewered his neck and lunged after Sam, who sidestepped the attack and let the half-naked monstrosity tumble by.

Caroline was not so lucky.

Her eyes had been focused on the elevator and the man-beast managed to catch her trailing foot and yank it out from under her. She fell to the ground, screaming for help that her husband attempted to give until he found himself being manhandled to safety by Andy, who was shouting for everyone to get into the elevator.

A motley collection of fast-movers, including a portly man in a tuxedo, a woman in a blue floor-length dress, and another woman wearing pink underwear and one fluffy slipper, had appeared in the doorway and were scrambling into the dark foyer.

Only a few yards separated the two groups.

Budd pounded the button for the reception.

Andy dragged the doctor inside as the doors started to close.

The majority of the fast-movers got no further than Caroline, descending on her in a frenzy of savage hands and biting teeth, but several of them did make a dash for the elevator, sprinting from the darkness towards the light.

Budd’s breath caught in his mouth as they approached.

“Caroline,” the doctor wailed.

Even if only one of those things got inside, I’m pretty sure it would’ve been curtains. All we had left were a few kitchen utensils and a heck of a lot of bad language, but I doubted that either of ’em would do us any good.

You only need one fox in a chicken coop…

The man-beast in the tuxedo placed his hand on the sliding metal surface of the door, but he was a fraction too late. They closed with a thud and the bell chimed.

Budd exhaled loudly and then looked up to the elevator’s ceiling. He removed his Stetson and ran his hand through his sweat-drenched hair. His bandaged head was pounding but he no longer felt the pain. As they dropped away, the sound of the monsters banging their fists against the closed doors echoed down the shaft in chase.

At the back of my mind—hell, at the front and the middle, too—I wondered ’bout what would be waiting for us at the bottom. We had nowhere else to go…

When Budd’s breathing had settled back down, he looked around the lift at his fellow survivors. They were largely quiet and still, except for Reginald, who had collapsed to his knees and was weeping into the palms of his hands. His spectacles rested on the top of his thinning grey hair.

At the side of the elevator car, the injured blonde woman was sitting down in the corner with her head leant against the wall. Blood was running from her face, dripping onto her black dress. From the shape of the injury, and the jagged edges of the wound, the damage appeared to Budd to have been made by teeth.

She’d been bitten.

Jack was at her side, his hand on her shoulder, while the other blonde was trying to rip the bottom from her silver dress to make a bandage. Tears streamed down her face.

The way the uninjured blonde reacted to what had happened to her carbon copy answered one of my earlier questions. They probably were sisters…

Aside from those three and the doctor, the only survivors from the original group were Juliette, Andy, Sam, and Father McGee; from the newcomers, the only others were the two women, who were standing at the back holding hands. Budd thought about all of those that they’d lost: Frank, Carl, and Caroline, as well as several people whose names he’d not had time to learn. Although he didn’t know it for sure, he assumed Chris could also be included in their number.

Not that I minded the thought of that slime-ball coward being eaten. I just hoped he’d come back as a zombie so we could kill him again. But what did trouble me was that all of the others had been killed in the last few minutes.