Robert W. Walker (23 page)

"He said all that?"

"Yes," said Wiz. "I would have to say that this evil springs from the same source as all evil in the world, an eternal river of evil that flows beneath us all and from time to time infects whole populations."

"How can we dare oppose it, Stroud? How?" asked Leonard, returning to the circle.

"Dr. Cline's people are working on--what, Kendra?--something in the way of a biochemical deterrent to this thing?"

"So far, all we know is that it works on the zombies," she replied. "Whether or not it will work against the source is anyone's guess, but yes ... we're fashioning darts and a gaseous form of the substance."

"Then we are not completely without armament," Stroud tried to sound reassuring.

"I have ... some fears," said Leonard.
"An awful fear."

"But we have a weapon," replied Stroud. "Dr. Cline has developed something for us."

Cline explained, "Using what we learned in reviving you, Dr. Leonard, we have developed a biochemical projectile laced with the stimulants that revived you. This was being tried on the many coma patients, until they began to attack us. We had upped the dosage given you to ... to create the killing poison."

"It stops what it hits," said Stroud.

"The same substance which brought me out of coma is being used now to
kill
other victims of this thing?" asked Leonard. "This is somehow backward and sounds like madness in itself, Dr. Cline."

"We've had no choice in the matter. They're out there, on the streets," said Stroud, defending her. "They attacked us and would have dragged us into that pit headfirst if we hadn't fought back."

Wiz and Leonard exchanged a worried glance. Wiz said, "Even if we could get near the pit, nothing will stop the mother of this evil,
nothing.
"

"Survival of the fittest, I suppose," said Leonard. "Are we to survive, or it?"

"Funny, I never thought of myself as fit for consumption before now," replied Wiz. "And I still don't."

"It appears to have something to do with will and a strong mind, Doctor," said Kendra Cline. "In a sense, it's survival of the fittest mind, steel-plated or otherwise."

Stroud gave her a half-smile. "Time we planned our strategy, people. Some of us are going to have to go back down there, and we're going to have to hold on to our strong-mindedness in the face of terrifying obstacles."

They grew silent with the fearful truth of what Stroud proposed.

"Oh, by the way, Stroud," said Wiz. "Something came for you addressed to the museum."

"Oh?"

"A package."

"From Cairo," said Leonard.

"Cairo, Illinois?" It was not far from Cairo to Andover, Stroud's home.

"No, heavens, man! Egypt."

"Egypt?
Really?
Where's the package?"

"Box, actually.
Very curious about it ourselves."

Wiz brought it in, a well-protected box of perhaps two foot by three. It took a full ten minutes to get to the bottom, snatching stuffing out of the center, but eventually Stroud came out with a crystal skull in his hands and a note from Dr.
Mamdoud
in Egypt. The note was characteristically clipped:

Dear Abraham,

Learned of your distress in New York and the part you are playing there. The enclosed may give you some insights, support, help. We pray and hope you will accept this gift. A man such as yourself, the skull will be used well. I was moved--no, compelled--to do this for you.

Mamdoud

Stroud was flabbergasted. "Do you have any idea the risk he took to get this to us?"

The others watched him leave with the skull cradled in the crook of his arm. "I will return soon," he promised, disappearing with his prize.

At the Gordon construction site the zombies had begun to form a thick wall of stony guardsmen, row upon row of them. SWAT teams and police of every rank had moved in on the area, which continued to swell with the infected people, some of whom had rioted against the police. It was widely known that Police Commissioner James Nathan and a handful of others had escaped the mob, and that upwards of a hundred construction workers, medical people and policemen were trapped inside the circle of zombies who were not responsive to the demands of the police.

Each time the police moved closer, the wall got tighter and thicker around the construction site and pit. Nathan didn't know what to do, but opening fire on the zombies after what he had witnessed was most tempting. But for now all was silence, all was still. The zombies were like one brick wall, Nathan thought. Even if Stroud and the others got up the nerve to go in, they'd never make it past this army of
protectors.

The city was sealed off, under quarantine as well as martial law now. The governor of the state had stepped in and sent five thousand troops. The U.S. Army and the Navy were on standby. There were no airplanes, trains, buses or automobiles entering or leaving New York City. Even the harbors were closely guarded, for fear the disease would spread to other cities, counties and states. There were armed guards at every tunnel and every border crossing. Those remaining in New York were trapped here along with the zombies and whatever worse fate awaited them.

"I didn't sign on for this kind of duty," said one national guardsman to the cop standing beside him.

Harry Baker looked at the man. The guardsman wore a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, very expensive, along with a Rolex. He might be an accountant in civil life, or a lawyer, a young one at that, Harry thought. He wondered if the other man would hold up the night. Harry had fought in the war, had done a three-year stint with Emergency Services as a medic and had been on the NYPD for almost sixteen years now. He had thought that he had seen everything, up until now.

The brass had paired any number of first-timers like the Rolex guy with seasoned cops and now Harry occupied a hastily got-up "bunker" with the kid. The kid had shown him pictures of his nine-month-old, his cat and his wife in that order. Now, together, the two men stared at the wall of unmoving,
granitelike
men, women and children who formed a barrier around the construction site. They'd been like this for hours on hours. Stone men stoned, Harry had thought. It chilled him, gave him the all-over creeps, the sort that not even a hot shower could quell.

The hostages taken by the zombies were most likely dead and there was no communicating with this herd of deaf-and-dumb humanity, try as the NYPD might.

It was like the time before a battle, Harry thought. The fireworks were sure to come. And suddenly, they did.

It started with the ominous
hummmmmmmm
of thousands of people chanting in unison, creating of them a kind of single soul, Harry thought. He had never seen anything close to this. The only comparison--and it didn't come close--was a "wave" at a football game. But there the people were aware of one another, aware of their intentions. Here, it was something else as the throng of zombies began to move outward toward the armed soldiers and police in the mindless approach of an army of ants.

"What'll we do?" asked the guardsman beside Harry.

"Whatever the brass tells us!"

Then gunfire broke out without anyone's ordering it. Harry decided it was one of the untried guardsmen who'd fired, but it made little difference now as everyone opened up. The gunfire was electrifying to Harry, who'd been itching for something to happen all these hours, but it had the opposite effect on the Rolex guy, who slumped down into the bunker and began to blubber about how he had been home with his wife and kids only sixteen hours before in Albany and why was he here in the middle of New York's problems, anyway?

Harry emptied his clip into the oncoming zombies, ducked away and began pulling the kid together. "You got a weapon, soldier!
Goddammit
! Use it!"

The swarm of walking dead just kept walking over those falling ahead of them, and they were getting closer and closer, crushing barricades in their way. Some of the dead ones were lifted by others and used as shields now, and the zombies relentlessly moved forward, caving in anything in their way, trying to get at the living--and succeeding in places.

A few flamethrowers were brought in, and when some of the dead--those shot through the gut--suddenly got up and continued advancing toward the men with the guns, the flamethrowers went to work, catching fire the leaders, who rushed through the fire and grabbed hold of some of the soldiers on the other side of the flames as their bodies crackled and were consumed by the fire. Others all around the burning zombies were breathing in the acrid smoke, choking and backing away.

Harry Baker saw them breathing in the sulfur-filled air and he realized now that the zombie action was designed to recruit more to their side from the ranks of the soldiers and police. The choking, black cloud of air was filled with the germ or virus they carried. Harry had read about it. Something put out by the CDC people had warned that the virus could go airborne. Well, here it was, in full fury, and these guardsmen and cops breathing it!

From his vantage point he also saw other zombies ganging up on some poor devil and rushing him overhead from hand to hand, back, back and back toward the pit, presumably to feed whatever was down there.

"I'm getting out of here," Harry told the guardsman he was stationed with after he unloaded his gun once more into the onrush.

"Yeah, we've got to pull back!" agreed the guard.

"To hell with pulling back!
I mean, I'm done! I'm out of here, and if you're smart, you'll do the same!"

"You're running out on your duty?"

"Listen, soldier boy, I never signed on for this kinda shit, either!"

Suddenly the barricade of sandbags that they were behind exploded over them with the onrush of what seemed to be seventy, eighty, ninety fiends, all reaching out to them. The guardsman and Harry screamed in unison but it was drowned out by the
ummmmmmmmmmmmmm
chant of the zombies. Harry saw that the guardsman froze up. He tore the man's automatic rifle from his grasp and fired and fired until he was overwhelmed by the numbers. He felt himself suddenly lifted and knew that he was being handed overhead, that he was being spirited to the pit and that damnable thing inside it. Alongside him, riding on a crest of zombie hands, was the guardsman, who'd lost his glasses and was screaming for help.

Harry slipped out a four-inch blade he kept in his boot, bobbling it and almost losing it as he was jostled forward. He saw the kid's body come near and he screamed, "This is for you, kid!" He tore a hole in the kid's jugular and watched as the blood rained down on his attackers, who seemed as oblivious to this as they were to everything else around them. Harry then placed the knife at his own throat and was about to rip into himself when he realized that he couldn't do it. Try as he may, he couldn't cut himself as he had the guardsman. And in that moment's hesitation he was slammed hard into a buttress of copper pipe as they moved him relentlessly along, knocking him into a semiconscious state. He'd lost the knife.

Harry didn't see the others like him all around, moving over the heads of the enormous crowd. The enormity of it, the numbers being moved into the pit, could only be appreciated from the air where a news camera was filming until the cameraman, suddenly overwhelmed by the horror at the end of his viewfinder, doubled over to vomit.

The only other place the scene could be viewed clearly was in the eye of Abraham Stroud as it reflected back from the center of the crystal skull he held at arm's length in the candlelit room at the back of the museum where he had found solitude and hiding.

"My God ... my God," Stroud said over and over as he watched the fate of men like Harry Baker, for the crystal now showed him clearly what did happen to men who were transported down into the bowels of that ugly, unholy ship.