The Hysteria: Book 4, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (24 page)

Manetti didn’t jump out from behind the door, or land on top of me. She wasn’t in the room.

She wasn’t in the room.

She wouldn’t have gone up to the roof. And there was no place to hide in the rink area. She had to be in the back.

By the fire door.

My stomach dropped.

We’d pulled our shooters off the back of the roof so they could focus on the parking lot out front.

The rear was unguarded with a possible breach.

“Mia!” I shouted.

She stopped what she was doing and looked over her shoulder. The barricade was holding, somehow, against the sheer weight and press of the enemy outside. Probably because the knifers along the face of the building were getting killed and forming a wall of corpses their comrades had to get over before moving in.

“The back door! I need your help!”

She didn’t hesitate. She just processed the information and jumped off the barricade with her shotgun and hustled.

I had my piece out as we slipped through the doorway leading into the back rooms. It was dark. I didn’t remember it being dark.

The door was open. The rain was slanting in through it, slicking the concrete floor.

I charged.

And ran into Manetti’s foot. She planted her instep in the middle of my chest and knocked the wind out of me.

Mia didn’t hesitate. She fired, the boom from the shotgun deafening in the tight space, the flash briefly illuminating the store room. I saw Manetti in that split second. She’d crouched so she was out of the line of fire and she lunged into Mia.

I got up. It felt like I was trying to breathe through a crushed straw. Manetti and Mia were tangled. I decided to go for the door first and help Mia second.

I got in the doorway and reached for the handle.

There were three of them right there, only a few feet away. The first one collided with me and the other two piled inside.

I pulled the trigger twice. That got them off me. My brain quickly inventoried the scene. Two of three were shot, the other was underfoot, Manetti and Mia were struggling, the door was still open.

I couldn’t get to the door in time. More of them flew inside. I did the opposite of what they expected and let them come in. I wanted them out of the doorway. They were already inside. I couldn’t let any more in. A handful was okay. A horde would tear us apart.

They all had blades and they all came at me once. I started shooting. I had no choice. I was afraid one of the bullets would go right through them and hit Mia. But I had to take the chance. I had to shut the fucking door. Or everybody was dead.

The bullets didn’t deter them much. They were shot but they kept coming and one of them fell in the doorway. The other two were right there. One of them slashed at me and the blade just caught my forearm. I put the gun against his forehead and pulled the trigger.

He fell backward and the other one tripped forward. He slashed at me as he was going down but I jumped out of the way. He fell and landed in the doorway. I stepped on his neck. I put all my weight into it. His scream came out a weird strangled gurgle. I tried to shut the door but his head was in the way.

I couldn’t slam the door. It had one of those mechanical devices that forced it to close slowly until the last few inches. I crowned him a few times but there was little force behind the hit.

And the rest of them were closing fast.

The nearest one had a fucking kitana blade. She raised it above her head, samurai style, and brought it down through the small opening of the door. I got my hands out of the way. The sword buried itself in the back of the head of the guy on the floor and blood sprayed.

I shot Ms. Toshiro Mifune. She did what I wanted her to. She fell in front of the door and created a roadblock.

I didn’t want to pull the sword out of the guy’s head so instead I jumped on the safe side of the blade and forced it the rest of the way through. The guy’s crown slid off him. There was about a four-inch drop from the bottom of the door to the ground. The sword fell with the top of the guy’s head out of the way.

I heard gunfire above. Maybe Megan had checked the rear of the building and seen these knifers coming. They were sprinting toward me and they fell and splayed as they were shot. Death from above.

I got the door shut just before one of them reached it. It latched and I heard the desperate pounding on the other side as the gunfire continued.

I turned to help Mia. She was a tough girl but she was dancing with a highly-trained federal agent. If she was still alive, that would be a win for her.

Bad timing. Manetti elbowed Mia’s nose and got loose of her. I had a second to brace for the impact as Manetti plowed into me. I tripped over the dead men on the floor and fell backward.

My shoulder blades hit the bar on the door and the door opened.

I slipped outside and Manetti was on top of me and the knifers were right there.

***

The door was open and they were trampling over me, their eyes on the bigger prize of breaching the rink. There were loud bangs and I realized Mia was firing. The bodies fell on top of Manetti and me. I couldn’t move with all the weight bearing down.

“Eddie, I don’t want to kill you,” Manetti said.

I didn’t have my breath so I said nothing as, inevitably, Mia ran out of ammo and the knifers pushed in. I heard the rifles firing from the roof above and realized I was either going to get stabbed intentionally or shot accidentally if I didn’t take action.

I wrenched my hip and threw Manetti off me. I got to my feet and got some space between me and the crowd.

“ROPE!”

I remembered Megan had rope ladders up there. It was my only chance. Most of the knifers were going for the door but a few had spotted me, the easy kill.

The rain was still coming down hard.

With the spotlights on the roof I couldn’t tell what they were doing. I just heard the guns and didn’t see the rope.

A middle-aged man whose gut was as wide as his shoulders came at me with a paring knife. I shot him in the neck. I was going for the head but you take what you can get. Blood fountained out of his throat.

More knifers peeled away from the main group at the back door and flocked toward me. I got off three shots before the gun clicked empty. I was dead. Unless—

The end of the rope hit the ground next to me. I grabbed it with both hands and hoped like hell someone was going to pull me up. I was good at climbing ropes…back in high school. That had been half my life ago.

The knifers were two steps away.

Somebody on the roof read my mind and I was pulled up. I felt the blades swiping at my feet. I was heaved all the way up to the roof with three big pulls. I grabbed the ledge and threw one leg over it and vaulted.

The water on the roof had grown another inch.

Megan helped me up.

“Your sister!” I said.

“I know.” She looked tentatively at the roof access that was still propped open. I knew what she was thinking. Hero or not, there was a small, calculating part of her that was weighing options. We could go down there like she wanted and help her sister, or we could close the door and settle in on the roof.

We eyed each other for a second. That was all the time we had. But we communicated our mutual understanding all the same. Then she nodded.

Megan called out four names, including Dyer’s. “You four stay topside. Everybody else, get downstairs!”

I was downstairs before anybody else.

Somehow Mia had gotten out of the store room and now she and three others were trying to close the door as blades slipped through the two inches between the door and the frame.

One man put his shotgun in the opening and pulled the trigger.

“Hold the door!” I yelled.

He heard me above the blood-curdling screams and gave me room. I charged down the hall, hoping my human battering ram technique would work.

Mia and the others strained against the animal force pushing the other side of the door. I got up a good head of steam and threw my body into the door.

It worked. The door shut.

One of the men gripped the knob. It was turning in his hand.

“Where’s Megan?” Mia said. “We need the keys!”

“We need help out here!” somebody down the hall shouted.

“Get Megan!” I shouted back. “We need the keys to lock the storeroom!”

I couldn’t see the person at the end of the hallway, just a silhouette. I knew it was a man. One moment he was standing there, trying to comprehend the situation based on my orders. The next, a machete cut him down. And a knifer took his place.

They were inside.             

“Hold the door! I’m getting the keys!” I said.

***

My gun was empty. But like my krav maga instructor always says, a man is never defenseless.

The knifer charged. So did I. One of the things I took away from my short stint in the joint: you always move forward. Always.

He hacked as we met about halfway down the hall. I saw it coming and grabbed his wrist before he could complete the arc. I turned and hoisted him over my shoulder. He flipped and landed badly on his back. I wrenched the machete out of his grip and brought the blade down to his throat. Blood sprayed. I wished I’d used a gun. I would have preferred putting one in his brain so it was lights out immediately. But now I got to watch the poor bastard squirm and grope at his neck for a few dying seconds.

I tried not to comprehend what my eyes saw. If I lived through this, I might not live through this.

I left him to die and went down the hall. I was still holding the machete. Megan was wrong. I wasn’t affected. I’d just used the blade to kill someone and I was still holding it with no problems.

I reached the end of the hall and stopped dead. The skating rink was total carnage.

The knifers had breached the front door. Megan’s people were still trying to close the barricade again but with one look I knew it was useless. The knifers were getting in. Just as many of them inside as us.

Megan stood in front of the barricade and barked orders to close the gap and kept shooting the enemy as they came over the wreckage. She couldn’t get them all. There were too many and they were leaking inside.

And the gunners were passing out. The enemy was too close now, much too close. I watched for a brief moment as it seemed like half our people fainted. The two guys I’d charged with keeping everybody awake were doing their best but they needed help.

I gripped the machete tightly. In close quarters, it would be almost as good as a gun. But then I realized the problem.

Everybody with a gun would be shooting at anyone carrying a blade.

A man is never defenseless.

I dropped the machete and found the nearest baseball bat. It was all I had. And I had to get to Megan.

I pushed through the scrums, avoided hacking blades, and cracked some skulls. My nose was bleeding badly again and I couldn’t breathe through it. The blood ran into my mouth.

I got to Megan at the barricade.

“I need the keys! They’re coming through the storeroom!”

She put a bullet through some knifer’s head as more of them came up over the barricade. The dead man slid down the pile of debris and nestled among the other corpses at the foot of the garbage.

“Back pocket!” She picked off somebody else, but she was only getting one out of every two that scaled the barricade.

I found the keys in there and turned to go back to the hallway.

From the barricade, though, I saw our people retreating to the rink. The knifers poured out of the hallway in hot pursuit. The store room was lost.

“They’re in!” I shouted.

Megan took her eyes off the barricade for a second and looked over her shoulder. “Form up! NOW!”

***

The gunners formed two lines at Megan’s command. They concentrated all their fire. The gunfire was deafening. Their bullets tore up the interior of the building around the hallway.

The knifers kept coming.

I took a handgun from Megan and joined the front line. Most of the others were firing at will, spraying their ammo. I took good shots, trying to kill each time.

The knifers piled up in the mouth of the hallway.

A perfect chokepoint.

They had to climb over the bodies of the fallen to come at us. I ran out of ammo and hurried back to help Megan. Along with five others she was trying to hold the barricade. More of them were getting through, which forced Megan and company to turn from the barricade and defend their backs.

“Got another clip?” I asked.

“No!” she said.

I still had my bat. “Focus on the barricade. I’ll take care of whatever gets through.”

“You better, or we’re all dead.”

I made good on my word. The knifers that had gotten inside were as tired as I was. But their hysteria wouldn’t allow them to rest and gather strength. I was smarter. I bided my time and let them make a lot of weak swipes and then I closed. I cracked skulls and busted kneecaps. My mantra: one swing to drop them, the other to finish them. No wasted movements. I had to conserve my energy because we had no idea how long this would go on.

I was fending them off so Megan and team could focus on keeping more out. I got slashed a couple times. I barely felt the cuts. Adrenaline is the best drug.

From time to time I gauged the battle lines. Mia was out in front. The knifers were piled three or four bodies high in the mouth of the hallway. We were turning the tide again. The knifers were growing cautious, hanging back now instead of just rushing blindly into a firing squad.

Mia saw her opportunity and ordered the lines to close on the hallway. Twenty gunners moved as one and leaned on the dead bodies in front of them to take their shots.

Megan and her crew were holding the barricade.

I was down to my last knifer. She came at me underhanded in a stabbing motion and I batted her wrist as hard as I could. She dropped the knife and howled. The pain froze her in place.

I brained her in the back of the head. The strength went out of her legs and she went down.

“We’re holding!” Megan stopped what she was doing at the barricade and turned to gauge how the firefight in the hallway was going.

She pointed. “They’re holding too! Look!”

I turned. A few of the shooters had stopped firing and were just holding their weapons out in front of them. At first I thought Megan was right. I thought they weren’t firing because they had run out of people to kill.

But then I saw Mia come up out of her stance and I realized what was happening.

“They’re out of ammo.”

***

Slowly, the shooting petered out. The relative quiet was overwhelming. I could hear muted gunfire from outside. Dyer and the others on the roof hadn’t run out of ammo yet.

The knifers waited. The most dangerous ones were left. They were left because they had some measure of control over the disease and didn’t feel compelled to run into almost point-blank gunfire.

They waited. They were testing Mia’s firing lines.

Two more shooters used up their ammo. Now only one person was still sighting down his rifle. He tracked his gun back and forth. A knifer came out of hiding down the hall.

The rifle jerked with his final shot and I heard the click. He was out.

“We’re all out too,” Megan said. She climbed atop the barricade and used the butt of her rifle to push a knifer back outside. The man tumbled down the slope of debris. But more were coming.

“I can see at least fifty out here,” Megan said. “How many that way?”

I ran to Mia’s side and looked over the pile of dead bodies down the hallway. The knifers were starting to come out. They lined up outside the storeroom, two-by-two.

“At least thirty this way!” I said.

“And probably more we can’t see!” Mia shouted.

We were out of bullets. Our guns were useless. But we still had fight in us. I looked around and did a head-count. We had twenty-five people still standing.

Mia lowered her voice. “If any of us faint, it’s over.”

She was right but I ignored her. I raised my voice so the knifers could hear me too.

“Let them come!” I felt what could only be described as bloodlust. The violence had driven me mad. “Let them climb over their dead friends. We’ll fucking kill every one of these fucks that tries to get in here!”

For a breathless moment, the knifers waited. Watched.

Then they started making noise. Not words, but guttural sounds. Inhuman. Animal in nature. The din swelled and they were all screaming.

I gripped my bat. I was ready. Let them come.

They charged up the slope of dead bodies toward us.