LZR-1143: Redemption (21 page)

As Kate stepped up to the walkway, I stopped, frozen in place. The stairwell we had used to climb up led to a wide doorway leading to the interior of the building, where the concessions and restrooms and shops were located. The far side of the building, where the windows led to the outside, was visible from where I stood. And outlined against the faint moonlight outside was a group of nearly a dozen creatures.

“Kate, turn slowly. I don’t know if they’ve seen us yet,” I whispered into my microphone, and Rhodes and Artan automatically swiveled, well out of view of the doorway. Kate stopped, and slowly turned on one heel, eyes finding the movement and stopping cold. Ky and Romeo, already up, were frozen near Rhodes, and he stopped where he was.

“How many?” he asked, gun up and ready.

“Almost a dozen, maybe more inside,” I whispered, eyes locked on the milling bodies inside.

“They spotted to you?” Artan’s voice rasped on the network.

“Stand. By.” I said slowly, annoyed at the traffic.

They bounced against one another, their outlines stark against the somewhat dirty glass of the building. A large stuffed bird of some sort wilted against its ropes in a large display, the remnants of souvenirs strewn at its feet. They didn’t seem to have picked up on my presence and I stayed still, hoping I’d have a chance to move.

“Uh, Mike?” Ky’s voice was worried, and I responded quickly.

“Don’t worry kid, I’m just going to stay here until they move on.”

She was quiet for a minute, then spoke again.

“Yeah, well… I think we don’t have time for that,” she said, and I looked up as she pointed toward an entrance to our right only two hundred feet away. A long, straggling line of corpses was emerging, seemingly at random, but I cursed a I realized that they must have heard the chopper, and they were only now making their way out. I turned back, staring at the ones inside again.

Several of them were now staring back.

Shit.

“Time to leave,” I said loudly. Waiting with his finger on the trigger, Rhodes started firing at the group approaching from our right. I pushed Ky back away from the doorway, and hefted the Pathfinder. Kate stepped in beside me. There were too many on the right, cutting us off. We’d have to go inside.

The shotguns tore into the line of undead in front of us, taking away limbs and ripping through torsos and skulls, explosive rounds tearing through flesh and igniting skin and hair.

There were dozens coming from inside toward us, and Rhodes and Artan backed into position behind us, Ky and Romeo in the middle. The polished concrete walls echoed fiercely as the guns crashed and the bodies exploded. We moved forward slowly, relishing the impact of the explosive rounds.

I fired into the torso of a skinny creature, still wearing the ball cap with the Seattle logo, jaw unhinged and bloody, eyes wide and staring. The explosive rounds cut him in half, sending the top of the torso careening into the wall with the sound of a cantaloupe falling from a table.

The pellets spread out, some of them traveling through the skinny man and into two more creatures, both young women, both wearing summer dresses that hung from skinny, rotting shoulder blades. One still clutched a cell phone in her emaciated hand. They were thrown back into the hallway behind, skidding to a stop in a bloody, black smear.

Kate was working her way forward, cursing loudly every time she fired the large weapon. The creatures in front of us were thinning out, and I heard Rhodes on the comms from behind.

“Must. Go. Faster.” He said, and I heard the whisper of his silenced weapon, shots repeating in precise cadence.

“Yeah, got it,” I said. More than a dozen still stood before us, and I pulled my trigger once more. Click.

Time to have some fun.

I drew the machete with my right hand, transferring the bayonet to my left. The balance was somehow better that way.

Beside me, Kate fired two more rounds, and I heard her machete leave the scabbard.

“Come in,” I said calmly over the microphone. My blood was pounding in my head and my chest heaved. “It’s clear.”

“You have not finished…” Artan began. But then he understood.

I waded into the undead.

I took the first with a forearm to the jaw, using the plates of metal in the jacket as a weapon, and followed with a stiff thrust from the machete through the skull, taking the creature in the soft skin below the chin. I swiveled quickly, pulling the body with me by the still-impaled head, using it to block the next two creatures as I grasped the shotgun by the end, extending its reach, and turned, spinning on one leg and releasing the impaled creature. I allowed my weight to carry me through the pivot, and two heads fell neatly to the floor as I ended in a half squat.

Kate was pulling her bayonet from the chest of an old man, who had somehow lost his shirt and pants, but not his large foam hat. She kicked the body backward into another creature and then moved in with her machete. The foam hat stayed with the head as it fell to the ground, bouncing absurdly with the message “We’re Number One!” emblazoned in the blue plastic.

I whirled again, vaulting the counter of the nearest food stand and waiting for the last three creatures to line up at the counter, arms outstretched and leaning in for me.

Three little piggies, all in a row.

Their heads burst open easily, and I stepped back from the blackened brains that fell to the counter, a humorous, if disgusting, statement about the establishment behind me.

Kate and Ky came around the corner, and Artan spoke in a muted whisper.

“They’re coming from the walkway. Too many. Must upstairs to go. Come.”

I followed Rhodes, who was reloading as he walked, reminding me to do the same. Fishing into my pocket, I ejected the spent magazine and threw in another—non-explosive this time. I had a feeling I’d need those later, and I only had one left—the Seattle folks hadn’t been introduced to that toy yet, so our special ammo was scarce.

Our footsteps echoed loudly in the cavernous stairwell, designed for hundreds of people every hour. Emerging on the next floor up, I exhaled loudly. The path was clear to the left, where we needed to go. But the doorways into the stadium itself were closed and chained.

We ran past the mixture of stores and concessions, past several dead and devoured bodies, noticeable as human only from the protrusion of spines and femurs from the mass of black, bloody pulp on the dirty floor. Candy wrappers and old paper towels from the restaurants mixed with the refuse of the bodies, and the smell almost plowed us under.

I grabbed Ky by the back of the jacket and carried her twenty feet while she vomited loudly, Romeo whimpering softly next to her, a tongue lashing out for her gloved hands.

“Around corner, to walkway,” Artan breathed into his comms, and I heard Rhodes’ gun whisper once, taking a shambler in the face as it slowly pushed its head out from under the counter of a wings restaurant, sending it pin wheeling clumsily into a soda fountain.

Behind us, they started to stream out of the stairwell we had used, drawn to the gunfire from below, their feet slapping mindlessly on the polished cement.

Artan slowed as we reached a pair of double glass doors with a chain wrapped around the metal handles. On the other side, a long glass-enclosed tunnel ran over the street below and to a series of commercial buildings and a parking lot on the other side. On the road below, there were no creatures visible.

“We have to shoot,” said Artan, gesturing at the doors and raising his pistol. I turned away from the shattering glass, as the sound ripped through the empty area, carrying behind us to our friends, and across the building.

The overpass was tiled in a bright white commercial porcelain, and it reflected the meager light streaming in from the glass walls from the thin moon that had emerged from the cloud cover. In the distance, I could see the waterfront of the city, water covering the street that sat parallel to the sound. One lane of the roadway was submerged, and the bay had almost reached the flooded avenue.

Finnigan had warned us about the water.

The city of Seattle, much like D.C., faced water intrusion and retention problems. Massive series of pumps helped keep the intense volume of water that constantly dropped on the concrete jungle from accumulating at sea level, and instead helped funnel all the moisture to the sea. When the power went out, the pumps went out. Now, the water was doing what water did. It was flowing downhill, and collecting. Soon, the bay would connect with the roadway, where the runoff was gathering. Then, the waves would slowly start working against the line of tall buildings along the waterfront, eventually beating them into submission, and reclaiming the land that had been stolen from it when the sound was dredged to make more room for city.

Circle of life, baby.

In the building behind us, they had reached the tunnel, and began to pour clumsily into the glass tube. We reached the end of the walkway, and Artan cursed loudly, in what I could only assume was angry Albanian.

“Share, please.” Rhodes was focused on the angry herd behind us, only seventy feet away.

“Lock again. Doors very thick for now. We need to explode.”

“I have a grenade, let’s do it,” said Rhodes, pulling the small explosive from his pocket.

“Problem is too much bang. We go out there, or we get injury.” Artan pointed at the creatures, advancing quickly.

“Rhodes, take her,” I said, pushing Ky towards the large man and pulling the shotgun to my shoulder. “We’ll hold them off, follow us.”

Kate and I moved into the breach again, and I heard the footfalls behind us. My pulse quickened again, and the adrenaline surged. There was no fun in shooting. The action was up close. It was personal.

Their stench reached my nostrils and I closed my eyes.

It was no longer the smell of the undead. It was the smell of battle. Of living.

Kate screamed and I opened my eyes.

A creature took me by the throat, hands scrabbling for more purchase on my jacket.

Beside me, her Pathfinder spoke right before a roar that drowned out the shotgun. Chunks of glass and metal shattered into the walls, glass falling.

I grabbed the arms at my throat, and pulled them to the sides. I felt the bone and sinew pull from the shoulders with a tearing sensation rippling through my arms. The arms dropped to the floor, and I raised the gun. The thick metal pellets tore through three bodies, tightly packed against one another. I turned slightly, taking two more, both at head level. Blackened brain sprayed into the bodies behind, some of them slowing to taste the effluent smeared on the bright tile.

Kate’s gun spoke again, and I followed. She screamed, whether in fright or joy, I didn’t know. But I smiled as I fired again, watching the heads explode and the torsos shatter. I suspected the latter.

“Mike!” Rhodes voice wasn’t in my ear bud, it was in my ear. “We are leaving!” he yelled, and I shook my head slightly, looking behind us.

Artan and Ky were perched at the top of a set of stairs leading down into the commercial buildings below. Kate was stowing the shotgun and turning away. My hand twitched on the weapon before turning and following, begrudgingly leaving more bodies behind.

That’s when I felt it.

The first hiccup.

My chest shuddered briefly, and, like the fluttering wings of a scared bird, my heart twitched. Quickly, and then gone.

Shit.

I took a deep breath as we moved toward the stairs and followed Ky and Artan into a broad gallery of shops, the doorway to the street level propped open with a paint can under a large sign marked “Construction Under Way.”

THIRTY-TWO

The city was a ghost town. I had never noticed how much noise you come to expect from a large collection of buildings and roads—that you seem to expect the very concrete itself to hum with life and energy. That the cars that so annoy you when you are trying to cross the street or get directions, really are like the blood in the arteries of a living, breathing metropolis.

Without it all, without the power and the lights and the cars and the raised voices and the panhandling and the street musicians—without all of these marks of humanity, our cities are merely our tombs, waiting to be filled by the dead.

Seattle had become a tomb.

The herds that had been here had taken no prisoners and given no quarter. There may be survivors in the large, looming buildings, their profiles blacking out the slim hope of moonlight in the canyon-like streets, but they did not own the city. Street corners and intersections were macabre reminders of the brutality of thousands of undead, parked cars and storefronts with broken glass and skeletal remains were reminders of the hopelessness of being stranded, alone and defenseless.

We moved north, carefully and quietly, taking the narrower streets that moved in the right direction, heeding Artan as he stopped carefully behind cover, at specific landmarks, and at seemingly random intervals.

“I park here once with woman,” he said as we passed a small park in the center of a several large office buildings.

“In your cab?” asked Kate, glancing around the spectral park, untended trees dipping long branches toward a series of fountains.

“I work in cab,” he said dismissively, as if insulted. “I go on date with car of me.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, markedly disinterested. I smiled, watching Ky shadow Rhodes across the street, dodging between a stopped bus and a t-boned car at the crosswalk.

We were crossing parallel to the park and moving along the line of broken and shattered windows of an old hotel when Romeo disappeared around a corner, nose twitching. I grabbed Artan’s shoulder before he followed the dog into the next street. I shook my head and held my hand up to my mouth, warning him against speech, noticing the dog’s hunting mode.

Rhodes knew the drill, and he stopped, crouching out of instinct. I edged forward, peering through the shattered window of the hotel’s display, watching for the animal’s return.

“He knows the beasts?” Artan whispered softly, and I picked up the coffee and cigarette smell of his breath.

“Yeah, he can smell ‘em or something. He’s good at giving us warning.”

“Mike,” Ky’s voice was quiet, and I barely heard it.

“He comes back?” Artan asked, apparently annoyed at the slow-down.

“Yes, but sometimes it takes a—”

“Mike,” Ky said, interrupting, this time louder.

I looked at her, and she didn’t look back. She was staring at the shattered glass in front of me. I turned, at first not seeing the target of her anxiety.

“Balls,” said Kate, pulling her weapon around and whipping her head from side to side.

“What the…?” I muttered, turning away from the hotel.

The glass plating was vibrating.

I turned in place, eyes scanning in the dark.

The roads were clear.

I looked up, searching the sky for a helicopter that might account for a low vibration.

Nothing.

Looking through the shattered window once more, I watched as the broken panes vibrated stronger, turning from a slight shake to an audible rattle.

Something was coming.

“Mike, we need to—”

“We don’t know where it’s coming from,” I interrupted her, and Kate looked around, head turning in place.

Rhodes looked up sharply, his night vision goggles glowing softly and flashing red.

“What?” I asked quickly.

He shook his head, as if confused.

“Nothing. I just… thought I heard something.”

Shit.

The streets were clear.

The skies were clear.

They were in the goddamned buildings.

“Get away from the hotel,” I said, grabbing Ky by the jacket and pulling her away from the window.

I knew where Romeo went. He went in the front door of the hotel. That’s what he smelled. That’s where they were.

“Move! Down the street! They’re in the building!”

Glass showered down on us as I finished yelling, and I hunched over Ky as she screamed in surprise. Artan cursed loudly over the comms, and dove for cover behind a parked truck. A body landed heavily near the wall, and instantly twitched and rolled toward us.

Kate and Rhodes barreled past, Kate leaning her arm out and grabbing Ky’s other arm as Romeo darted back out into the street, his loud bark confirming what we now knew.

More glass shattered, and more bodies fell to the ground. I looked up long enough to see the outline of a piano and several tables—they must be coming through a ballroom or a restaurant.

I pushed Ky in front of me and then folded over, the massive weight of a body slamming me to the ground. Another sharp pain and then another bore me to the ground as I rolled to the side with my momentum.

“Go!” I shouted to Ky, hoping she could hear me. Thrown free, she rolled away and scrambled to her feet.

With my face to the ground, I heard the loud moans, seemingly in my ear. The fetid stench of rot and effluent was heavy in my nose, and limbs moved against my body like a nest of thick, coiled snakes. Judging by the number of impacts, there were at least four of them.

My shotgun had been thrown free, and my arms were at awkward angles. I struggled to get them under me, needing to push up, push away. I knew I could get them off if I could just get into position.

The first bite was a solid pressure on my calf, and barely grazed exposed space before the metal plating and Teflon absorbed the pressure. I squirmed under the pile as the second bite came, the teeth scraping against the top of my head, a low groan accompanying the effort.

Okay body, time to get your shit in gear.

Copy that, mind. Panic on the way.

One arm was under me, and I needed it to be enough. I pushed, my head a fiery mixture of anger and blood lust. My body turned with the unbalanced force, throwing some weight from the pile, and freeing up enough space to move my other arm. I levered it under my body and pushed myself through the thrashing creatures.

Bodies slammed into the pavement next to me as I spun in place, dislodging hands and recoiling in horror from the gnashing teeth. Kate was moving toward me, but I motioned her away, triggering the mechanisms in my jacket and moving my arms forward even as the thin blades locked into position. They made quick work of my friends—a man in a business suit, a small Asian woman in a maid’s uniform, and a hefty horse of a man in a construction uniform of some sort.

As I was stepping away from the pile, I heard Ky yell from across the street, her finger pointed around the corner, where Romeo had disappeared before.

“Your butt should go soon,” said Artan on the comms, and I jumped up onto the bed of the truck that was nearest the wall, hurtling the cab, and sliding down the window.

Hundreds of them were streaming from the front entrance that we hadn’t been able to see from our position before. The large, ornate doors hung at odd angles, broken and shredded, as if people had tried to hide there, but had been discovered.

I reached for my Pathfinder and sighed loudly as I realized it was lost, but drew my machete and sprinted past them as they stumbled into the intersection. I was only feet from the first of them as my boots hit the pavement and I ran toward the park, joining the rest as we jogged down the street.

We moved cautiously but quickly, keeping up the pace, and using small side streets to try to throw them off. We crossed into several parallel streets and moved constantly and carefully. Rhodes occasionally dispatched a lone shambler with his suppressed carbine, but overall, we made a steady progress for twenty minutes. Several times, we were forced to divert to the east, away from the sound by obstructions in the roads or larger groups of the undead, seemingly gravitating to the south.

As we reached a more commercial and renovated portion of the downtown area, Artan stopped us next to a plain, historic looking red brick building. We squatted behind the cover of a large maintenance vehicle, cherry picker still extended to a tangle of wires at the top of a slightly bent utility pole.

“We have choice,” he said. He pulled out his map of the city, pointing at a location roughly ten blocks away, at the intersection of 5th and Pine streets, roughly halfway between our location and Lake Union, the large body of water that abutted the University on the southern side of the campus.

“We go here, or…” he pulled his hand further to the east, marking out the interstate. “We try this place. I know it is not with car. It clear.”

“That’s what Finnigan said at SeaTac,” I said, still doubtful. “Something about an accident at the onramp near the city center. But I still don’t like the exposure. This is the monorail station, right?” I saw the small mark on the detailed map, and knew it from my own research with Kate the night before.

“Yes. But need to go through building. Entrance up.”

Kate shot me a look, and I knew her thoughts. Better to stay in open space where we could run. We were a match for smaller groups, but large groups in confined spaces…definitely a problem.

“Rhodes?”

He looked over my shoulder briefly, eyes still scanning the perimeter carefully.

“Fuck the interstate, man. Those things are death traps nowadays. Gimme the mall and the train line. It’s elevated, so once we’re up, we’re golden.”

I frowned, but after thinking about it again, I begrudgingly agreed. There were no good choices in this world. Only a selection of crap platters on a rotten tray.

“Monorail it is,” I said, and Artan nodded once.

“What’s a monorail?” asked Ky, standing up and following me as we rounded the corner of the truck.

“It’s a train, but it only runs on one track,” I said, amused.

“What’s the point?”

“It’s… I suppose that…”

Shit. I didn’t really know.

“You don’t really know, do you?”

“It’s… No. I got no clue.”

“Uh-huh. And your generation was in control when this crap went down. Remember that. You built stuff just ‘cause you could, then can’t remember why.”

Kate looked back and caught my eye, hearing the exchange. She raised her eyebrows and I shrugged.

The kid was astute, that’s for sure.

“All we care about is that it’s elevated, it’s a solid track that runs from downtown to the Space Needle, which is fairly close to the Lake. Once we get to the Lake, we move north toward the university. It’s just one more chunk of land we get to travel with a lower threat.”

“There aren’t any lower threats here. Just bad choices and worse ones,” she said, and walking away, her loyal canine following.

Man, the kid was two for two.