LZR-1143: Redemption (30 page)

“Rhodes, now!” I yelled, and he holstered his pistol immediately and pulled the door behind him as I threw the lighter behind me, taking the trail of flammable liquid and igniting hundreds of the creatures along the way.

We dove into the small space as a dull roar filled the air, and then a louder one, as the flames found the canister on the floor amidst the assembled creatures. I held the door shut as the hallway burst with flames and bodies again.

FORTY-FIVE

The ducts were wide enough for Romeo to stand upright and for Ky to crouch. The rest of us still had to go on all fours, but it wasn’t the cramped belly-slither that I had dreaded. I hated small spaces, and the fear of being suffocated being amplified by the fear of being eaten alive by hundreds of the walking dead… No, didn’t much appeal to me.

The large tubes spread out from the lobby in a web of ducts, converging on one point in the middle of the lobby, and then branching off again. We were in one of the ancillary tubes and needed to make our way back over the area we had just left, above the thousands of milling corpses that we had excited with our activities, and through the main intersection, then take the right tube that would lead us above the small room that housed the lock controls.

“Okay, no one speaks, everyone take it slow and easy,” I said over my shoulder, following Romeo as he tentatively sniffed the dirty metal surface and stepped gingerly on paws unused to a circular, and slippery, ground.

“What!” yelled Ky, and I saw Kate motion to her to keep silent. She was still getting over the explosion blast.

“Uh, not to second guess you, man, but… what does it matter if they know we’re here?” Diana’s voice was whispered, as she overcompensated for her inability to hear properly.

“It matters because if they follow us, and the door to that room is open, or they know where we are, we’re never leaving that room.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Any more questions?”

“Maybe.”

I stared.

She stared.

“Fine. No.”

“Good.”

Fuck an A.

Romeo got the hang of it and moved forward slowly.

Every ten feet, a small grate allowed us to look below, and I watched the creatures as they gathered around the doorway into the closet, hands pawing at the closed door, moans rising with eager hunger.

We passed over the area outside the destroyed doorway, and the smell of smoke and charred flesh and blood was thick in the small space. Bodies lay strewn about in an almost comical pattern, having clearly been flattened by the concussive force of the huge blast, all arrayed in a concentric circle with the entryway as an epicenter.

Twenty feet later, and we were on the outskirts of the large lobby. The gleaming marble and tile floor was barely visible beneath the shuffling feet of the denizens below, in suits and scrubs and lab coats. Jeans and uniforms and smocks. All stripes of people from all walks of life. All locked together in a deadly cage, to share in the end of humanity as one.

Now, some of them shambled about, searching endlessly for something. Others pressed their faces against the glass of the lobby walls, hands moving slowly against the smooth, filthy surface. Still others simply swayed in place, eyes open and staring, mouths moving pointlessly, as if they were chewing on something that didn’t exist.

As we neared the center of the room, I heard a curse and an expletive from behind, and saw Rhodes fall heavily against the metal floor. Crawling on one arm, with the intense pain of the injury to his other limb, had caught up to him. He had staggered and was picking himself up slowly, a trickle of blood escaping from the side of his mouth and mingling with the thick, unruly hair of his beard.

I shot forward to the grate nearest me and stared through the slim spaces between the slats.

Hundreds of eyes stared back.

Glorious.

I turned slowly and lifted one finger to my lips and held it there until everyone could see. Then I turned back, watching the forms below.

The eyes were unblinking, the heads all turned. The bodies had stopped moving aimlessly, as if sensing a reason to be still. Low moans escaped the few that chose to make noise, but the room was mostly silent.

Waiting.

My arms began to ache from remaining still. Behind me, I sensed movement as Kate helped Ky lower herself slowly, her legs growing weary from a prolonged crouch.

Mouths and eyes searched the ceiling, open and scanning for movement. For life. For food.

Minutes seemed like days as we waited. I imagined the thin metal collapsing, and pouring us out over the clustered creatures like the filling of a meat piñata. I imagined the helplessness we’d feel as we were torn apart. I imagined being stopped, so close to bringing a solution to the world.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, movement returned to the floor below. Heads swiveled again, and eyes shifted away, the movement of other creatures drawing attention.

We waited longer, to be sure.

Then, slowly, we moved on.

The main exchange in the middle of the room was tricky to navigate, as it was designed to pull air through and push it into a series of other passages, so a large turbine took up a large portion of the space in the center of the rounded metal housing. The steeply sloped sides posed another challenge as we attempted to stay silent.

Over a period of another hour, we slowly crept through the metal passage and down the next tube, passing over thousands of the creatures as we left the main lobby, down the adjoining hallway, and finally back into the protection of a wall, as the metal vent emerged over the small office lined with computers, screens and switchboards.

I took a deep breath and peered through what I hoped would be my last vent, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness below. The door appeared to be shut, and I saw no movement. Several small lights flickered weakly below, indicating a reserve power source remained somewhere in the litter of mechanisms below.

“I’m going down,” I said softly. “Wait for my word.”

My knife worked the edges of the grate until I could grip the edges, then I pulled the metal sheet away, grimacing as the metal groaned against itself. I quickly put my hands on the sides of the rectangular hole and dropped my legs into the darkness.

I saw the movement below too late.

My legs swung through and I released the edge, falling to the floor as I saw a head lift up from where it had lain against the surface of a cluttered workstation. Eyes gleamed in the scant light, and the mouth moved forward quickly, grasping the fabric and steel that lined the leg of my suit and tearing up. I heard the teeth shatter and the jaws come abruptly closed as the thing fell back, taken off guard by the resistance. It leaned back suddenly in the chair, and I stood quickly, activating the blade in my arm and taking it through the left eye.

My hand shot out as I cradled the limp head, eager to avoid making more noise. I gently laid it on the table, almost exactly where it had been before, as I shot to the door, confirming the deadbolt and the maglock were both engaged.

“Clear,” I whispered, and sat down heavily next to the dead body.

“What a day,” I said absently, and sighed.

He didn’t answer.

They rarely did.

*

“Why do you think I know how to work this shit?” said Diana, irritated and tired, as she stared at the panel of lights in the otherwise darkened room. Romeo was pacing anxiously near the doorway, while everyone else rested on the floor or in the chairs that lined the walls. A small fridge against one wall had revealed a stash of water and beer, and we were helping ourselves.

“It can’t be that hard, right?” said Rhodes, grimacing as his painkillers continued to wear off. Against Kate’s exhortations, he had refused to take more, afraid that they would dull his edge.

“Here’s the manual,” I said, pulling a dog-eared copy of the system’s guidebook out of a drawer, training my flashlight on it and flipping to the portion addressing emergency procedures. Scanning the page, I looked up to the complicated console.

“We need to type E7, F4 and then ‘return’ in order to override the lock mechanism,” I said, staring at the panel and cross-referencing the diagram.

“You sure?” Diana shot back.

“What? You worried that somehow we’ll be worse off? I think I can read a manual. Kate, what do you think about timing?”

She looked up from the small bag of peanuts she had fished out of a pack.

“We still making the same play?” she asked, crunching slowly on the nuts.

“No other option,” I said. “Unless we want to head for the quad.”

She shook her head, and then looked at Rhodes.

“You up for a climb, buddy?”

He nodded shortly. I was going to have to find a way to inject the man with a painkiller. He was clearly hurting.

“Okay, so we radio it in, release the locks, hope that some of these bastards flood out, then make our way to the elevator shaft. Climb up on the access ladder and pop out under the roof level, then one stairwell up to the helipad. Everyone on board?”

“Uh, Mike?” said Ky softly, glancing over at Romeo, whose tail thumped twice when I looked at him.

“We’ll think of something, kid. I’ve carried him on my back before. I can do it again.”

She nodded doubtfully.

“Okay, I’ll call it in.”

I reached to my belt, activating the comm system and pressing the transmit button.

“SeaTac this is Seeker, how do you copy, over?”

Static hissed for several seconds, and I adjusted the dial, tuning the frequency.

I repeated.

Several seconds later, the channel opened with the chaotic sounds of gunfire and raised voices behind the speaker. A loud explosion drowned out the first several words.

“… is SeaTac. Solid copy, Seeker. Christ, where have you been? Over!”

“SeaTac, we are in the last leg. Request evac in 45 minutes from position Alpha, copy?”

Several seconds of static, then a hurried, “Standby.”

Kate and Rhodes were tuned in to the frequency and both shot me slightly concerned looks.

Well, Kate’s was concerned.

Rhodes just twitched his beard.

“Seeker, SeaTac. Confirm evac in 45 at Alpha. Be advised that your LZ on the back end is very hot. We have contact on all sides, head count in the millions.” The young man’s voice was calmer than it should have been.

And by that I mean he sounded incredibly scared. But at least he could still speak.

“SeaTac, Seeker. Solid copy. We have good news. We’ll see you soon. Keep the lights on for us. Seeker out.”

I looked up at Ky and Kopland and Diana.

“We’re going from the frying pan into the shitter here, folks. Our helo is on its way, but the herds have reached the fort. We have a fight on our hands at home.”

Kopland looked up, face serious.

“Is there anywhere we don’t?”

I nodded.

“I catch your drift, Doc. Diana, let’s let the ghouls loose, shall we?”

She turned to the console and I reread the sequence. At first, the console stuttered slightly, the lights flickering. Then a long beep signaled that it was ready for activation, and she entered the codes.

For a moment, we wondered if we’d see or hear anything.

Suddenly, the monitors around us flickered to life, along with a small red emergency light. A battery beneath the desk began to hum as the monitors flashed twenty angles of the exterior doors, cameras trained on the exit points throughout the building.

At first, the doors didn’t move.

I wondered if the batteries were dead or the connections frayed or the sequence wrong. I began to look through the manual again, to find out where I had gone wrong.

Then, the dead were released.

They poured forth, falling forward from the confined spaces as the exit doors across the first floor burst open from the pressure of bodies.

As if chasing life itself, they exited the building en masse, moving as one.

As they left, they joined with what appeared to be a flood of bodies moving across the campus. I stared at the various angles, watching as hundreds and thousands of the creatures moved as one toward a single direction. A single goal.

They joined seamlessly, the creatures from inside the building not even hesitating to join the parade of bodies as they moved slowly and surely to their destination.

South.

Toward SeaTac.

Toward the largest concentration of survivors in hundreds of miles.

“Okay folks, time to go.”

“Mike,” said Diana, pointing at the monitors.

A single camera was pointed at the helipad, where several creatures in EMT uniforms clustered around the door leading into the stairwell.

“No big deal. We can take care of them when we get there,” I said, turning away.

“No, not them,” she said, worried. “That.”

Her finger pointed at the corner of the screen, to a mass of material that was barely visible. I stared for a moment as Kate joined me.

She was the first to recognize it.

“Son of a filthy bitch,” she said, her vulgarity returning in spades.

“Is that—” I was still staring.

“Yeah, that’s a wrecked helo. Our landing site is fucked.”

FORTY-SIX

“Manual says that all the elevators return to the first floor when the lockdown goes through. That means if we can access the shaft through the elevator on this floor, it shouldn’t be jammed up.”

I shrugged my pack into place and grimaced as the increased weight shifted awkwardly. Behind me, almost in my ear, Romeo’s face looked concerned.

“You think you have it bad?” I asked.

He licked me once and kept the worried look.

Ingrate.

Rhodes had sacrificed his pack to fashion a harness out of my pack and his. Luckily, we had been outfitted with top of the line 5.11 Tactical gear, which allowed modular construction of the packs. Additional nylon straps and a few carabiners later, we had a functional dog-pack.

“He doesn’t like being tied up,” said Ky, worried.

“Look, have some faith,” I said, exasperated. “Odds are that if I go down, all y’all punks are gonna go down too, so Romeo can just roll the dice with the rest of us.” I turned to Kate.

“We good on the door?”

“I don’t hear anything, and we saw how many of them left through the front. We lucked out there. Should have a straight shot to the elevator shaft.”

“Okay, everyone good to go? Rhodes? Good to go?”

“Other than this busted wing, I’m fully operational.”

“Okay folks, time to save the world.”

Kate opened the door and I slipped into the hallway, machete at hand. The pistol stayed home unless necessary.

Less noise, fewer zombies.

I needed to write a survival guide after all of this.

The hallway leading back to the lobby followed a slight curve, and was totally clear for the moment. I turned to the right, moving slowly, noting the multiple open doors along the hallway. Hopefully the open doors meant that the occupants had all moved away recently.

Kopland and Kate followed, then Ky and Diana, followed by Rhodes, who had his pistol up and ready.

We didn’t have time to clear each room, so I just risked the obvious. As I passed each one, I slowly pulled the doors shut and moved forward.

Ahead, there was a nurse’s station on the right, and the elevator shaft straight on. A bank of vending machines flanked the hallway on the left.

No movement yet.

I moved forward, shutting my last door and peering over the edge of the nurse’s station. Clipboards and tablet computers were strewn about as if discarded in a panic. A thick stream of dried blood decorated the white counter top and a larger pool clustered near the overturned chairs inside the enclosure. A single finger, complete with a simple wedding band, lay on the counter next to the telephone, a bloody handprint on the receiver.

Another hallway extended out to the right of the station, perpendicular to our hallway, and more than twenty open doors lined the passage.

This place was a nightmare of possible problems.

I gestured back at the group to follow close, and took one last look around, then sheathed the machete. I picked the elevator on the left, and grabbed the doors and pulled to the sides. They moved easily and the thin line widened inches from my face. I closed my eyes with the effort, feeling the doors move and the opening widen.

The air smelled off, suddenly.

Rancid.

Rotten.

Shit.

I opened my eyes in time to dodge the hand that shot out from the darkness inside. Shouting despite myself, I fell back, a foot of space now open between the two doors.

Inside the elevator, more than a dozen people were crammed, body-to-body, a pungent, foul odor of refuse and decay blasting into the hallway. Behind me, I heard running as the group clustered around me and Romeo whined.

“Quiet,” I said absently, activating the blade in my right arm.

“We got company on our six, man,” said Rhodes calmly, jerking his head to the rear. Inevitably, more than twenty of the shamblers from the lobby had been slow on the uptake, and hadn’t left the building. Now they were trying to join our party.

“Okay, let’s take care of these folks, shall we?” I approached the first one, a man in a lab coat and thick glasses with a missing forehead, the bone of the skull showing behind. The blade took him in the eye and he crumpled back. Ky’s crossbow spoke, and Kate and I leaned in to the space, liberally dispensing peace with our blades until it was clear. I pulled the doors apart fully, and reached up, using the corpses below as a stepping stool.

“You know, that’s not very respectful,” said Kate, half smiling.

I leaned over, staring at the pile of rotting flesh that, minutes ago, was trying to eat me.

“My apologies, sirs and madams. I fear that I may have been rude in my behavior. Can you ever forgive me?”

They didn’t answer.

“Okay smart ass. Just pop the top.”

I pushed up on the panel and it moved aside.

“I’ll pop your top,” I muttered under my breath, scanning the space briefly.

“You’re not popping anything of mine for a while, if that’s your attitude.” She left the elevator, the hint of a smile lingering in the air.

The creatures were closing, but thankfully none from the other hallway yet. We pushed Rhodes up first, then Kopland, who was already wheezing from the efforts of moving through the tubes. Ky went up next, then Diana. Kate and I pushed the doors shut behind us for good measure, making the smell in the small space more pronounced.

She reached for the edge of the ceiling, but looked at me meaningfully.

“You really think we can get that helicopter off the roof? Just me and you?”

I smiled.

“We’re like… superheroes. We can manage.”

“If you say so,” she said. “But what if we can’t?”

“Then we have them throw down a rope, and we send Ky up with the stuff. If there’s time, we all go.”

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded.

Outside, the first hands started to beat on the metal doors, and she started to pull herself up. I reached up, pushing her through the small hatch.

“Hey,” she said, and I pulled my hand back from where they had been firmly planted on her ass.

“Sorry,” I said instinctively.

“Don’t be sorry,” she threw back down, smiling. “Just commit to the moment.” Her head disappeared and I stared, confused.

The hands beat against the door, more bodies and more noise outside.

“Shut up, I’m trying to think,” I said absently.

Romeo whined and licked my face.

“Okay, okay.” I jumped up and easily pulled myself through the hatch, careful not to knock the dog against the ceiling.

The shaft was dark, but empty.

A welcome change.

A ladder extended up, slightly recessed in the concrete wall, passing through all seven floors and ending far above, against a utility panel at the top, near a ventilation fan. It passed each floor’s elevator doors a foot to the right, so we had only the seven story climb, then to open the doors on the top floor.

“Rhodes, I’ll take point,” I said to the big man, who was still scanning the tight space, his NVGs pulled down to help his vision. He flipped them up quickly, then back down, grunting slightly in surprise as he flipped them up and docked them.

“What’s that? Oh, yeah, copy. I’ll take the rear. You know, in case I plummet to my death.”

“Good call,” I said dryly.

The climb wasn’t hard, but we had to take it slowly. Kopland was in horrible shape and Diana, although young and fit, was dragging—likely from exhaustion. Kate took the slot in front of Rhodes to make sure she could help him out if needed. Ky was behind me, insisting on watching Romeo.

Romeo, on the other hand, was enjoying himself immensely. He had adapted quickly to his king-like status, and now panted happily in my ear, slobber occasionally finding its way between my neck and my suit.

In the middle of the shaft, we paused. Behind the third floor door to my left I could hear movement in the hallway. I knew why. Those that had been trapped on the upper floors wouldn’t have had an immediate way out like those below. They would need to slowly find their way to the exits, down the stairs, through several doors. It could take weeks, or they could slowly rot to… what, death? I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been long enough for us to see what the effects on these things were after a prolonged period of time. One assumed they ate for self-preservation—that something inside of them drew them to humans as a source of energy or life. If that were the case, when there was no more food, would they collapse and rot?

Or would they always be here, always hungry, always a threat?

“We’re good,” rasped Kopland, gaunt face appearing near my foot. Below, Rhodes nodded over Kate’s shoulder.

A sudden strike against the door to my left elicited a single bark from Romeo in my ear and I jerked suddenly, nearly losing my grip.

Cursing, I shushed him quickly. He gave me a wounded look as the pounding on the door became urgent and frenzied, now dozens of hands and arms instead of one.

“Don’t worry about it,” I threw down. “They can’t get through.”

But the sounds echoed in the narrow shaft, an eerie accompaniment in a dark and confined space as we continued our crawl up.

By the time we reached the last door, Kopland was visibly winded, the climb having taken the last of his energy and strength after an arduous last few hours. Diana was closing her eyes as she hung from the ladder, taking deep breaths.

“Remember, these doors will open to possibly more than a hundred of these things,” I said softly. “Everyone needs to get to the far side of the ladder. I’m the only one that will be engaging here. I’m going to open the doors and jump back out of the way. I’ll help them move off the ledge and hopefully we can dispose of most of them down the garbage chute here.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. Carefully moving from the ladder, I reached the narrow ledge outside the twin doors. Crouching carefully, I listened first for movement.

Nothing close.

Taking a breath, I grabbed the metal in both hands and pulled.

Begrudgingly, it gave way slowly.

One inch.

Three inches.

Five inches.

I saw movement beyond but pressed forward.

Seven inches.

They saw me and started forward. I cursed loudly. There were at least five of them very close, and they were moving quickly toward the doors.

Nine inches.

One foot.

The first hand grabbed the doors, and I gave them one more shove, widening them enough so that a single body at a time could press through.

And press through they did.

One at a time, they pulled themselves through the gap, hands reaching for me as I grasped the ladder with one hand and one foot, other hand using the slim blade attached to my arm to jab and pull, sending the blade into the head and jerking the bodies to the edge of the lip. One by one, they tumbled into the waiting darkness below.

A nurse.

A doctor.

A guard.

A child.

A man with one arm.

A woman in a smock.

A naked man with neatly sliced incision along his chest.

All tumbled off the ledge, and down the shaft.

After more than twenty minutes, the press of bodies slowed, and I was able to breath between visitors.

“All good up there?” asked Kate, making no effort to contain her voice.

“Getting there,” I said, pulling an absurdly overweight woman who had struggled to squeeze her girth through the gap, eventually widening the space by several inches before I tossed her down with the rest.

No more hands were grabbing for the gap, and I waited.

Five minutes went by and no bodies appeared.

Slowly, I disengaged from the ladder and peered into the darkness beyond the doors.

“Clear,” I said quickly, and pulled the doors open all the way. Looking down the hallways to either side, there was no movement. Shadows covered the ends of the narrow passages, and papers and linens were spread throughout.

There was more blood here. More debris.

I checked the signage near the elevator.

‘Intensive Care’ and ‘Wound Care’ were the first two offices listed.

That would be why, I suppose.

Ky hopped off the ladder behind me, and Kopland struggled to the edge and stumbled in, followed by Diana and Kate, who reached back to help Rhodes in.

As we moved past the nurse’s station on the right, I averted my eyes from the carnage. I had seen it all before, but it didn’t make it better. Blood spatters and pieces of bodies. A half-eaten thigh bone on the floor next to a pile of spilled magazines. A mug filled to the brim with coffee, untouched and unspoiled in the dry air, next to a neatly dismembered arm, teeth marks marring the torn flesh of the elbow.

The stairwell was only fifteen feet away, and we covered the distance quickly.

Carefully, I rapped once on the steel door and listened for movement before opening it inward slowly and peering into the darkness.

A scream behind me brought me back into the hallway, where I saw Diana stumble back from the suddenly opened door of one of the rooms lining the hallway. A small form in a hospital gown was attached to her leg, blood lining the wound it had quickly made near her knee.

It was a kid.

No more than four or five when they died.

Rhodes pulled his pistol but couldn’t line up the shot. Kate was faster.

She activated the blade in her arm and calmly grabbed the child’s hair.

It was a girl, face not overly gone with desiccation or decay, lines of ruin appearing but not overly marring a pretty face. But her eyes were gone. They were the eyes of someone who would never again know humanity.

Kate pushed the child to the ground slowly, and put her hand over the eyes before placing the blade against the temple. A tear dropped from her cheek as the metal slid home, and back out. The child stopped thrashing and she stood.

Nothing to say, I opened the doorway into the stairwell and we moved up.

We moved on.

There was nothing to do but to just keep moving on.