Chapter 9
The dead littered the lobby. They were flung about like trash. What once had been stark white marble tile covering the floor was now splashed with red from one end of the spacious area to the other. Benches were overthrown and chairs knocked about so that their legs stuck upwards like feeble, dying roaches.
Many bodies, torn and bleeding, were heaped in piles by the elevators. Picking over them like vultures were the undead. They rooted among the corpses like pigs at a trough and when something moved or moaned they went into a frenzy, ripping and tearing until the sound stopped.
As Griff stared in horror, an elevator let out a pleasant chime and its doors slid open. The undead immediately swarmed in. A woman screamed and a man bellowed a curse. The two tried to rip themselves free of the zombies but they were like clawed leaches and they dragged the pair down. Griff shut the door cutting off their screams.
“What’s happening?” Maddy asked in a whisper.
Griff found himself staring past her. The wall was white and blank, and on it was a replay of what he’d just scene.
Bryce pushed past him and cracked the door. What he saw was a continuous, repeating nightmare. Zombies with wet red faces worried over the corpses, blood up to their elbows. When the elevator chime sang out, their reaction was a pavlovian horror. Greedily they would charge the doors, glee on their dripping smiles.
Sometimes the people coming out would try to make a break for the street, thinking they could outrun their fate, but some of the zombies were shockingly fast and the people were pulled down and devoured just shy of the doors.
Mostly, however, the victims saw what awaited them when the elevator doors opened and foolishly tried to shut the doors before the zombies could get in. Every once in a while, the doors shut in time and the people would ride back upstairs where the smoke was growing denser by the minute. It was an easier death.
Usually, the cars were flooded with the beasts the moment the door opened. People were crushed against the wall, half suffocated, unable to move, unable to defend themselves. They died slow, horrible deaths, one bite at a time.
Four of the six elevators were still operating. The other two had bodies keeping the doors from closing. These rang shrill alarms, which only added to the din that shivered the air. What had been muffled eight floors up, was an explosion of sound that assaulted Bryce when he faced it in person. Ten thousand screams filled the air, hundreds of guns were firing at once, and what seemed like every car in the city was honking its horn for all it was worth.
When he had woken a few hours earlier, New York had been in what could be described as a “curiously nervous” setting, since what was happening in the city seemed minor compared to the devastation in L.A. That mental setting had quickly slipped into a worried “wait-and-see approach” as the local news grew darker, and frightening stories began to swirl.
Sometime in the last hour, the city had switched into panic mode. A television wasn’t needed to see the fires or hear the sirens and gunshots. And it didn’t take genius-level thinking to realize that their concrete jungle was surrounded by water and that it would take very little to trap them there among the creatures. The creatures that were multiplying at an alarming rate.
No one knew the exact rate of contagion because it depended on the situation. In the first few hours, when the city was unaware and people were going about their business normally, the initial four thousand people infected on the subways had gone on to infect an average of seventeen others before they were killed or confined to a bed in one of the now disintegrating hospitals.
Those sixty-eight thousand which constituted the second wave had a much harder time of it since the city was on alert. Each of them had only managed to infect six people on average. Still, at seven that evening, there were close to four-hundred thousand zombies in the greater New York area.
At that point it was already a virtually unstoppable army, but when Griff opened that stairwell door at a little after ten that night, the numbers had doubled, with another eight hundred thousand in the early stages of the infection. That was roughly ten percent of the population of the city.
Panic was the only appropriate response.
Unfortunately, people who panicked did stupid things. All at once, millions of people made a mad rush to escape the city before it was too late. Those with cars filled them to capacity with what they considered their most precious items and tried to flee. Heading east to Long Island didn’t seem all that smart since they’d just be stuck on another island, so a quarter of a million cars tried to go west to New Jersey.
Other than a few ferries that had stopped running, there were only three ways to cross the Hudson River by car from Manhattan: a pair of tunnels and the George Washington Bridge.
The traffic literally inched forward, then stopped altogether as the governor of New Jersey closed its borders. By then the demons were running rampant, attacking people in their cars. Traffic became completely fused, but that didn’t stop people from honking their horns endlessly.
Bryce stared out from the stairwell door in complete shock. Maddy stared out in despair. There would be no taxi. She would have almost no choice but to run out into the madness on blistered feet, covered in nothing but a gown; she felt like throwing up. With one hand clutching her stomach, she reached around Bryce and pulled the door closed. “Try calling the FBI again,” she said to Griff, speaking so quickly her words tumbled over themselves. “Or the police. Try the police. Tell them we’re important and we need help. Tell them we’re the only ones who know what’s going on. Please.”
“Sure. I can try, I guess.” Griff pulled his mask down so that it hung on his chin like a blue beard. He dialed 911, not realizing that, for the most part, the police force had been absorbed into the army of undead. They had been the first to come in contact with the initial waves and thus some of the first infected. There were tens of thousands of men in blue shambling around the city.
The phone went right to the recorded message: “All circuits are busy. Please try again…”
“It’ll be okay,” Griff said. He had a tick working under his left eye. It wasn’t going to be okay. Somehow, in the middle of an apocalypse, he’d become saddled with a twerp and a chubby feminist. They were anchors around his neck. That was his reality.
Leave them, a voice whispered from deep inside. Your only chance is to go on your own.
But they were important—potentially—and he had an obligation to get them somewhere safe. “Shit,” he muttered. Louder, he added a second time: “It’ll be okay. We keep moving. Shoot only when you have to. Keep the chatter to a minimum. And keep up. Your feet are going to hurt, but it’ll be worse if they get you.”
He turned to the door, but Maddy grabbed his arm. “But…” She began to hyperventilate and couldn’t finish what was going to be an incomplete whine, anyway.
Griff pulled her hands off him, saying, “We don’t have a choice. I’ll go first. You two stay together.” Then he just walked out into the lobby. He didn’t run. He didn’t even hurry. Griff acted like he belonged there, and somehow he was ignored. The undead had become predators and were more likely to attack someone running.
Maddy and Bryce clung to each other as they walked so close to Griff that they kept kicking the back of his shoes. By a miracle, the three of them made it to the jam-packed street. There were bodies here, too. Some were sprawled across the sidewalk, some were draped across the hoods of cars, some moved in the shadows. In the dark, it was impossible to know which was human and which wasn’t.
“This way,” Griff whispered.
He scooted between an ambulance and an empty car, ducked low and started south. Maddy and Bryce followed, hobbling as best they could. This wasn’t very fast or very quiet. Maddy, whose feet stung like she was walking on coals, kept up a constant, “Uhhhhh. Uhhh. Uhhhh.”
Griff had to stop and plead with her to be quiet. “We’ll find you something to wear soon. New York is filled with shops.” This was ge
nerally true, it just wasn’t true of that part of New York. They passed a doughnut shop, a Starbucks, a Staples, a car rental place that was on fire, and a liquor store that was shuttered and had men with guns on the roof.
Maddy stopped making the sound for a few minutes, but started up again after stepping on some glass. Bryce had stepped on the same glass and now the bottom of his right foot felt wet. He hissed with each step and was just thinking that they would never make it thirty blocks when he heard something behind them.
It was a dark being of great size and even greater malice. The creature reached out with a clawed hand with fingers eight inches long and nails almost half that. From it arose a stench like Bryce had never known. It filled his nostrils and drained the strength from his already weak legs so that he stumbled into Maddy. When she looked back and saw the thing, she instinctively shoved Bryce away from her and towards it.
Now there was barely a foot of empty air separating him from death. He was seized with sudden panic and without thinking, he lifted his pistol. He might have fired if something midnight black hadn’t suddenly appeared an inch from his face. It was Maddy. She had her gun aimed as well.
Griff turned just in time. “What the hell? What did I tell you two?” One of the cars they were passing had its door flung open. He grabbed a suitcase from inside, pulled it out, and heaved it over their heads. It struck the creature with a muffled thump, knocking it to the pavement. “Only shoot if you have to.”
Bryce was about to make an excuse, but now that his fear had subsided a little, he was able to visualize the creature in a way that he hadn’t before. It wasn’t nearly as big as he had thought. The black blood it was covered in had allowed it to merge with the shadows, making it appear larger than life.
In reality, it wasn’t large at all—or rather, she wasn’t large at all. The zombie had been a sixty-year-old adverting executive who just happened to get on the wrong train that day. She wasn’t big and she wasn’t all that strong, and she certainly wasn’t fast, seeing as she limped, dragging the remains of her left foot.
As they hurried away, she struggled to her one foot and came after them. When she came out of the deeper darkness and into a circle of light thrown down by a streetlamp, Bryce saw that she was also missing a hand and most of her face.
“Shoot only if we have to,” Bryce repeated as he hurried to catch up with Griff. “I thought she was bigger. Sorry.”
“It was a she?” Griff looked back at the stumbling thing. To him it was only a shape and a small one at that. “I hadn’t noticed. But it doesn’t matter…”
A much larger shape suddenly shifted in a minivan off to their right. This was definitely a big one. Griff ducked down and scurried around a yellow cab. Maddy and Bryce followed. As Griff stalked forward, he pointed down at a soda can. Maddy stepped over it and pointed as well. Bryce was craning his head back as the creature pulled itself from the minivan. This one was large and completely intact. In fact, it wore a blue uniform, complete with bullet-proof vest.
Bryce didn’t see the can and his bare foot gave it a kick. The can went bouncing, end over end, and as it did, all the other sounds in the city seemed to take that exact moment to pause. Bryce froze as time stood still for a dozen beats of his heart. Of course, it was racing so fast that the moment lasted only three seconds.
Then the creature charged. It leapt onto the hood of the cab and then dropped down in front of Bryce—now, he had to shoot. His gun came up, pointed at the thing’s head. He fired, aiming for the forehead. The pull on the trigger was greater than he had imagined and his hand as weak as ever. The barrel lifted as he strained against the trigger and when it went off, the bullet blasted a beautiful part through its hair.
He had missed.
“Shit!” Bryce hissed as it jumped at him. He fell back, firing his gun as fast as he could pull the trigger. His eyes were at squints and his face was twisted in a rictus of fear. Two bullets struck: one in its chin and another on the side of its neck. It felt neither.
Maddy fired at the same time, hitting its shoulder with the first bullet, and the building across the street with her second. Neither of these hurt it, either. It was up to Griff. Calmly, he fired once and blasted out its brain.
All six shots came in a two-second spread and once the creature fell at Bryce’s feet with an awful thud, there were only the echoes of their guns bouncing from building to building. The three stood stock-still.
Then, all at once, all hell broke loose.
Chapter 10
Suddenly, the dark street was filled with people. People and zombies. They came charging out of cars and buildings, and from every nook and cranny that might hold a person.
The humans knew only that there were three people with guns, and guns meant safety, or at least they’d be safer than before. That was the assumption. It didn’t matter if the three were cops or drug dealers. And it didn’t matter that there were other people who had been hiding nearby, either. To them, that was a bonus. There was safety in numbers…or so they assumed.
The zombies didn’t make assumptions. All they cared about was ripping the trio into pieces. Single-mindedly, they charged only to be distracted by the other humans.
A wild, swirling fight seemed to erupt out of the blue. In the darkness, it was nearly impossible to tell who was a zombie and who wasn’t. People attacked other people or ran from other people. Only the zombies seemed to know who was human for certain.
Griff was taken by surprise by the suddenness of the attack. He waved his gun in the faces of the closest people. “Back off!” The first woman did, throwing her hands up and darting behind a car. The next woman ignored the gun entirely and came blazing in with her teeth barred. Griff shot her, blasting those teeth out the back of her head.
Bryce and Maddy were shooting, too. Out of fear of hitting a human, they had to wait until almost the last second before pulling the trigger. Even with their targets so close, they wasted round after round. In a blink, Bryce’s gun was empty. The gun he had taken from Wilkes was a Sig Sauer 320 Legion with a 10-round magazine. The bullets went faster than he could’ve imagined.
“My gun…it’s empty!” he cried, holding up his gun. He had no idea what to do. Yes, he had another magazine, but he had no clue how to replace it. “What do I do?”
Maddy, who had a seventeen-round magazine and was spraying bullets everywhere, demanded, “How are you out? What’re you doing?”
“Nothing,” he answered, coming to stand very close to her—almost, but not quite hiding behind her. “It just ran out. How do I get the other one in?” The little button that ejected the magazine was black on black and looked like a decoration to him. He tried pulling the magazine out of the bottom of the grip, but it remained firm.
“The button on the side, you idiot!” Maddy shouted and fired again, missing her target and hitting the back window of a Prius.
Before Bryce could do anything, Griff had him by the neck of his gown and was yanking him along. They stepped around a woman being eaten by an extremely fat zombie. The woman was screeching loud enough to be heard ten blocks away. Maddy aimed her gun at the zombie, but Griff grabbed her arm. “Stop shooting. Both of you. We have to get out of here.” The fight seemed to be growing around them as more undead streamed towards the sound of their guns and the dreadful screams.
In front of them, the doors of a gleaming Lexus burst open and a family of four leapt out. A woman, blonde and leggy, had been in the driver’s seat. Her name was Victoria Deitch and up until that afternoon, she had been almost violently anti-gun. Now she was desperate for one. She attacked Bryce, and clung to him, pleading, “Take us with you.” Up close he saw that she had a narrow face with a high forehead and frightened grey eyes that couldn’t seem to see that Bryce was wearing a hospital gown and that he was as scared as she was.
Next to her and clinging as much as the woman was a golden-haired child of maybe six. With her button nose, pointy chin, and her puffy sky-blue coat that matched her eyes
, she was a precious little thing who would be dead soon. Her mother had only a fireplace poker as a weapon, while her dad had an old softball bat. He swung it Babe Ruth style at an onrushing zombie.
The girl’s brother screamed as the bat whipped past his face, nearly hitting him. He ducked away, crawling beneath another car.
Victoria tried to go to him while still yanking on Bryce’s arm. At the same time, Griff pulled him in the opposite direction, growling, “Come on.”
“Help me,” Victoria begged. “We have to get to him.”
As much as Bryce wanted to help to save her husband, he was more worried about himself—zombies were charging from every direction. Her husband at least had a bat. Bryce’s gun was still uselessly empty. There was a moment when he was stretched between them and then Griff began shooting, his gun flashing and barking thunder. Maddy was pushing him forward and shooting as well. The little girl was screaming. So much was happening at once that Bryce’s head began to spin.
Then the five of them were moving forward in a weird scramble with the woman looking back as her husband jumped up on a car. He was surrounded and was laying about with the bat, knocking heads.
“My son!” Victoria shrieked. “We have to get him.”
Desperation gave her strength and she swung Bryce around. Now Griff was accidentally choking him as he pulled on his collar, and Maddy was stepping on his toes as she bulled him out of the trap. Still Victoria wouldn’t stop trying to get him to go back. Couldn’t she see the pain he was in? Or the fact that his feet were bare and blistered?
“Jordan! Jordan, run!” Victoria screamed.
But Jordan didn’t run. He was terrified.
The woman was torn between saving her daughter and going back for her son. Before she could make up her mind, their little group was overwhelmed by the dead. The magazine in Maddy’s gun ran out of bullets a second after Griff’s did, and for a short time, the only weapon between them was the woman’s fireplace poker.
Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling Page 8