LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (30 page)

“Not today,” Kate whispered, refusing to surrender another life to the horde below.
 

She yanked the length of chain toward her with all her strength, detaching it from its pulley, and sending the off-balance walkway plummeting to the ground.

***

The walkway hit the ground in an explosion of bodies and dust, plunging the chaotic floor of the warehouse into an even thicker melee of violence.
 

As she descended, Kate pulled her legs and arms into her body, and as she hit the ground, she sensed the impact and rolled forward, staying in motion and flying toward where Annie had slipped off the vat.
 

The impact jarred her to her core, and she tasted blood in her mouth where she had gashed her lip with her own teeth. Her leg was bleeding as well—a cut from the jagged torn metal of the walkway, which had landed crookedly and bent into sharp angles among a dozen creatures, trapping several beneath its weight. Annie lay curled in the fetal position next to the sidewall of the vat, and several zombies were close enough to touch her. Kate barreled forward, putting a shoulder to each and grasping Annie’s arm with her left hand, yanking her to her feet.
 

Circling around quickly, she placed the child’s back to the vat, and faced her enemies, the eight foot length of thick metal chain in her right hand with her left pulling the machete from its sheath.
 

“Enough dicking around you rotten bitches. Come get me,” she muttered, before the chain came to life.
 

The assembled creatures roared in hunger and surged forward.

Huddled against Kate’s back, Annie screamed.

Behind the creatures, the fifty cal opened up again, accompanied by screams from the gunner atop the humvee. But the powerful weapon could only open a gulf between the fifteen creatures closest to Kate and the ranks of zombies waiting behind. It couldn’t march its huge rounds closer to Kate for risk of hitting her.

That was okay. Kate was doing fine on her own.
 

The thick chain swept forward in her powerful arms, arcing twice around her head before lashing into the first rank of zombies that pressed in. The solid metal crushed heads and flung frail and rotten torsos to the side. Disoriented, the battered creatures stood and regrouped, surging forward again.

Again, the chain circled her head and swept into the zombies, taking flesh and bone from their mangled corpses and spraying blood across the warehouse. The radius of nearly six feet was an arc of death in the arms of a desperate and protective mother. No zombie could approach. None would survive.

Her eyes were steel and her face an unforgiving stone. Above the battered corpses she had just felled, she moved forward relentlessly, seeking more death and more retribution. Her arms burned with the exertion, her blood pulsing in her temples, urging her forward.

The scream of the girl behind her brought her up short, and she turned away from the crowd that surged to pass the covering fire from the humvee. In one fell swoop, she scooped up the small child and bounded the fifteen feet to the bumper of the armored truck, sheltering in the swath of destruction laid down by the screaming fifty cal. Behind the humvee, the Rhino waited, idling beneath the popping semi-automatic fire of the soldiers on top.

She quickly shifted Annie to her back and grabbed the child’s arms as she leapt onto the hood of the humvee in a single vertical leap, clearing the five foot elevation with ease. The gunner let up on the covering fire as she climbed the windshield, then passed the turret, making one more jump to the roof of the Rhino behind the truck before slamming her hand down twice on the top of the bus. She saw Stacy huddled safely between two women, a tie-down already attached to her arm, and she smiled at the child.

But Stacy’s eyes were vacant and lost, and she simply stared ahead, gaze flickering to Annie with curiosity, then away again, lost in her own thoughts.

Shit, Kate thought. The kid’s going to be traumatized by losing her sister like that—it’s not going to matter that she’s alive. For the rest of her life, she’ll remember watching that hand disappear over the edge of the vat. Kate knew. She had seen it before.
 

The Rhino roared forward as the humvee pulled out, the warehouse floor now a swath of destruction—blood, gore, bone, wine, and chunks of twisted metal lay in equal parts across the cement floor. Spent shell casings gave the red floor a bit of holiday sparkle as their brass gleam shone up from the carnage.
 

The two vehicles blasted back out into the courtyard, turning two sharp lefts before dodging the carcass of Ky’s SUV and making time for the side exit where the rest of the group waited.

Inside the lead humvee, Captain Starr had witnessed it all.

The strength as Kate held the walkway up with one hand and the child in the other.
 

The bravery and skill as the woman wielded nothing but six foot length of chain and a machete against nearly a score of creatures.
 

And the super-human athleticism that allowed her to jump to the hood of the lifted vehicle, and across a six foot chasm between the two armored trucks. The lithe movements. The confidence. The way her body became a precision instrument beneath a beautiful face.
 

Starr was impressed.

No, she was more than impressed. She was intrigued. This was no ordinary woman.
 

Kate would make a valuable addition to their group, she thought, absently fingering her dog-tags and smiling.
 

Yes indeed. Once she had her priorities aligned, she would make a perfect soldier. But Starr knew she would need to be cautious. There was something about this woman that was dangerous. Whether it was her strength and speed, or that flicker of defiance in her eyes that she tried desperately to hide from Starr.
 

She needed to be careful. But she suspected that the rewards could be substantial. This woman operated as if she weren’t afraid of the creatures’ teeth and nails. The was strong. Too strong.
 

This was more than a coincidence.
 

“Where to, Captain?” Specialist Fray asked as they reached the gate and the convoy pulled in line.

“North,” said Starr, her voice slow and completive, her thoughts still on Kate.

“Sir, we already hit the border, and those roads …”

“North,” said Starr again, her voice now sharper, but eyes still on the town as they passed the city limits. A fire raged inside one of the smaller stores to their right—no doubt a ruptured gas line from the quake—and Starr stared at it as they passed.

“Yes sir,” said Fray, knowing better than to push her luck with Starr.

The Captain had made a decision.
 

They would follow the route that their new friends had been taking and they’d see where it led. There was something going on there, and she wanted—no, she needed—to be part of it. To be part of Kate’s secret.
 

That was their future. She was sure of it.
 

Smiling softly to herself, she put her thick boot on the dash and leaned back, eyes closing as she replayed the scene from the warehouse in her mind.

The city of Vancouver was no more.

In the first quake, large buildings had crumbled. Others had toppled against their brethren, titanic clashes of cement and steel resounding through the narrow, corpse and trash-strewn streets. Glass had rained from the sky like razor sharp hail. Asphalt had buckled, sending geysers of water, sewage, and natural gas into the air. Flames had sprouted out of hundreds of ruptured gas lines. Electric wires fell. Water mains shattered.
 

And amidst it all, the zombies roamed. They herded together, instinctively fleeing the calamity. Hundreds of thousands met their ends underneath millions of pounds of rubble and debris that gained from the sky and crashed to the ground. Many, still writhing under the broken city, still struggled in vain when the water came.
 

The tsunami crested before it hit Vancouver Island, the large barrier island that separated the beautiful city from the Pacific Ocean. The full energy of the wave slammed into the rugged hills and mountains of the park-like sanctuary, tearing trees from the ground and spinning them like tops into the air and through the foaming edge of the water. Massive boulders were swept into the deluge as the wave turned into a fifty foot high surge of seawater that was channeled through the narrow gap between the promontory of the Olympic National Park to the south and Vancouver Island to the north. The water slammed through the narrows, covering the islands and washing inland, where Mike and Kate and Ky and Romeo watched it make landfall over western Washington.
 

That same surge of water traveled north, removing islands from the map, and taking Vancouver from the south.

Up into Boundary Bay, the small sheltered cove on the south side of the city, around Point Roberts, over Westham Island and the islands facing Vancouver—Gabriola and Galiano. Surging up the Fraser River and finally pushing over the seawalls, over the beautiful parks and placid green space, bringing with it the sound of rushing water and the cacophony of destruction.
 

The city, already devastated by the earthquake, had its back broken by the monstrous wave.
 

Boats and boulders, cars and homes; cargo ships; whales; oil drums and slabs of concrete from broken bridges and displaced roads. And billions of tons of seawater. It all came crashing through the beautiful condos and businesses of the city of Vancouver. More buildings fell. More bridges collapsed. Entire floors of buildings that had miraculously escaped annihilation from the earthquake were hollowed out by the power of the wall of water.
 

It flowed through the streets, pushing north and east, reaching the eastern suburbs of Langley, Abbotsford and Chilliwack within minutes, following the river valley through the gorge, expanding the river, pushing the earth back and staking claim to the land itself.
 

South of the city, Highway 99—which became the north-south US Interstate 5 only miles south of the center of the city, ceased to exist. The bay had permanently expanded, and now encompassed vast swaths of the city—houses, roads and fields—all under dozens of feet of water.

The downtown was unrecognizable. Toppled buildings decayed in double time, bleeding concrete and steel into the raging waters below. Girders were all that were left of massive swaths of the city. Once-proud behemoths of modern construction wept as they fell to their watery graves, never again to be touched by human hands. The city belonged to the sea, now.

Only the strongest buildings survived. They could be counted on one hand, those that stood tall above the tumult of the shifting land and amidst the swirling of the angry sea.
 

And in one of those few buildings, atop many floors of undead, churning water, and broken concrete and steel, the weeping form of Elizabeth Whitmore had somehow, some way, survived.
 

When the shaking had started, she had instinctively fled away from the windows, finding the reinforced glass and steel of the booth comforting and safe.
 

As the layers of drywall and decorative sheetrock fell from the walls and revealed the guts of the building, she trembled in fear, convinced she would die alone in the terrible quake.
 

But when foam ceiling tiles and rolling chairs were the only things that descended on her exposed head, and the shaking stopped, she she had begun to hope. She emerged from underneath the desk of electronics, cautiously making her way to where the windows had stood facing the city. Shattered glass covered the floor and she carefully avoided the larger pieces. Entire office suites of furniture had danced their way across the floor and out the window.

And as she had peered out into the dusk, taking in the bleak vista, she gasped.
 

Like metal fingers poking from the grave, steel girders and lonely pipes were the only evidence of entire apartment buildings. The skyline had been emptied out. Some buildings lay against their neighbors, like drunken friends making their way home from a night on the town. Fires raged in fifty different places as gas lines ruptured and spewed flame into the gathering night.
 

And that’s when the water had caught her eye.
 

At first, she thought it was a trick of the dimming light. At first, she thought the sea could never rise to such heights. Could never be so angry.

She was wrong.

She watched in horror, her feet moving backward slowly, as the wave pushed the city to its knees. As it covered the parks and streets. As the terrifying low rumble of water—billions of gallons of cold, dark seawater—making its way toward her echoed off the sides of the buildings still standing.

She watched as cars were flung through fifth story windows. As billboards were tossed into the air, upended by boats that flipped and turned as if toys in a giant bath.
 

She had cringed as the waters rose below her, as she felt the power of the water slamming into her building. She had screamed as she ran for the security booth, seeking the comfort of something strong and secure.
 

And when she was sure it was over, she allowed herself to stand once again, and walk to the edge of the room, and stare at the remnants of the city below.
 

Liz had been scared before.

She had been lonely.

But she had never given up.

Now, in the silent finality of the calamitous crescendo of the destruction—as she realized that she was now the only living resident of a steel and concrete island in a city of the dead—she began to lose hope.
 

***

She had realized the promise of the air vents two days ago, but had only managed to remove one of the grates to find her way into the closest passage, above a large desk on the north side of the building. Now, that desk was gone, having slid into the new ocean below through the shattered glass of the large window. The grate hung crookedly from the ceiling, swinging in the light breeze as she took it in.