They didn’t speak. She looked into his eyes and he knew her fear and felt it as she did.
Just like before, they were heading into more danger.
Chapter 40
Starving as usual, Bryce had been shoveling handfuls of lunchmeat down his gullet from his open pack when Maddy grabbed his arm, her nails digging into his flesh. He stopped and tried to peer ahead, his blue eyes dilated like a cat’s. That’s where the danger lay. There were easily two hundred zombies coming up behind, they were the known. It was the unknown that had her heart pounding.
And his as well, now.
“Something’s going to happen,” he whispered.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Yeah. The question is what do we do?”
“Um, we need to get out of here,” he said. It was unhelpful to say the least, but the idea of stepping forward and leading was too much for him just then. The guilt of his failure still hung around his neck and this was made worse as Victoria kept looking back at him with the beginning of an accusation on her lips. He saw Tessa so clearly in the outlines of her face that it sent razors across his heart.
Maddy’s eyes narrowed and Griff stared, seeing Bryce as he had been three days before: small, nervous, timid.
“Yeah and how do we do that?” Maddy asked.
Bryce shrugged, causing Maddy to scowl and ball her fist. Before she could punch him, Griff stepped between them. “We’ll ask Jayson. He knows these tunnels like the back of his hand. He made it right?”
“No,” they both said at once. The group was a shambling mound of dust, tears, blood and rags. In the dark, it was hard to pick one person out from the rest. But Jayson wasn’t with them. His wine-marinated scent wasn’t among the others. His body was more than likely a thin layer of jelly beneath one of the trains.
Griff looked back and forth along the dark tunnel. He could hear the moans and crazy laughter of the zombies coming up behind them. The sound sent a shiver down his back.
“We’ll go on,” he said. “Whatever’s in front of us can’t be as bad as what’s coming behind. No train can get past all of that mess back there. Besides, as far as I can tell, we don’t have a choice.” He was unconvinced that either of them had any psychic abilities. So, what if they had been nervous about coming down into the tunnels in the first place. It was a scary place to be. Being scared did not give someone ESP.
Whatever fear Griff and the others had diminished quickly. After only a couple hundred yards they could see the golden glow of a light. It was one of the sconces set on the tunnel wall and as they crept closer they could see that more of them were lit as well.
The ragged group was traveling in a sniffling, whimpering clump. Afraid to be heard, they had spoken little. Now they began whispering in excitement over the lights. After the terrifying crash and the hellish darkness, the lights represented a return to normalcy. They began to quicken their pace. Some at least. Those who were dragging mangled limbs were soon left further and further behind. Bryce and Maddy hung back with them.
“We have to do something,” Maddy hissed.
“Like what?”
“Like something,” Maddy shot back. “You’re the one who used to always go on about your G.P.A.”
School seemed like it was a hundred years ago, but that didn’t mean he had forgotten how much he had crowed about his grades. He’d been like a peacock at the end of every semester. The memory made him feel like an idiot. The feeling was quickly swamped by the unsettling knowledge that with every step more of them would die.
With no idea what he was going to say or do, Bryce suddenly sprinted down the tracks, running to the head of the group. Putting his hands out, he stopped them. “We have to go back. Something bad is about to happen.”
“Something bad?” a woman asked. Her features were obscured by the dust and grime clinging to her; the only thing that set her apart from the others was that she wore a man’s yellow slicker over her winter coat. She had the insane idea that the zombie germs would slide right off the yellow vinyl. “Something like getting your face eaten off? Cuz that’s what’s gonna happen if we go back.”
“Who are you guys?” a deep voice asked from within the crowd. A mountain of a man with cheeks like slabs of pork and three chins piled one on top of the other, pushed through. “You weren’t on the train.” His words came out slurry from a bloody mouth, and on closer inspection, Bryce could see he was missing almost all of his front teeth.
Sid, who had just finished the last of his whiskey and was eyeing the empty bottle unhappily, said, “We gotted run over by the train.”
“Then you guys aren’t a part of us,” the lady in the slicker declared. Only the bloody-mouthed man nodded in agreement. Everyone else was still too shell-shocked to know who was who.
“It doesn’t matter if we were on the train or not,” Bryce told them. “We…none of us, can go on. What lies ahead of us is worse than what’s behind us. If we go back, most of us will get past the zombies. The men will draw them to us on this track while the women and children escape along the other set. It’s pretty simple and if we act…”
The mountain of a man spat at Bryce’s feet. “Fuck that,” he muttered and once more began heading for the golden lights. Most of the group began to move with him. “You’re all going to die.” It felt like a childish thing to say and the woman in the slicker responded in an equally childish manner by flipping him off with both hands.
“Ya think sometin’s coming?” Sid asked before he tipped his bottle far back to get the last few drops of whiskey from it.
“Yep. Don’t know what, but I have a guess.”
“That crazy burnt chick?”
Bryce pictured her dragging her maimed body out of sight under the train, like a giant rat. She was out there, driven by hate and hunger, but had she gotten ahead of them so quickly? He wouldn’t put it past her. Nodding he answered, “Her, maybe the other one. I’m not sure.”
Sid looked ill. “They lived through all that?”
A shiver went up Bryce’s back. “Yes. I saw the…” He had been about to say woman, but it was no woman. “I saw the burnt chick. She’s hurt but that won’t slow her down for long.”
“Ya amember about that life debt ya owe me?” Sid eyed him close, looking for any sign that Bryce might try to weasel out of his obligation. Bryce nodded and Sid grinned. “That good. Ya seen what happens on Star Trek when people don’t own up, right?”
Nerd as he was, Bryce had fallen in between the various Star Trek shows and had never watched a single episode, which was just as well since Sid was making things up concerning “life debts” as he went along. A few minutes before when they seemed to be moseying along nicely to the FBI, he’d been considering what sort of monetary value it might have.
“He owes me!” Victoria cried, shoving Sid back. “He owes me a child! I haven’t forgotten and I never will.”
“He owes me my life,” Wilkes’ last mercenary growled. He was barely holding on at this point. He kept blinking trying to focus his eyes and he had begun to feel a strange urge to sniff the people around him. He could smell their sweat and wanted to simply give a lick to their flesh. A strange thought kept running through his head: humans were the only animals that salted themselves.
The merc stumbled past Victoria who flinched back. “I’m in this mess because of you. You and her and him.” He pointed vaguely in Maddy’s direction. “You guys just shoulda said yes.”
“Maybe,” Bryce replied, without looking the merc in his darkening eyes. “Probably.” If he had, none of them would be standing there, trapped in the dark tunnels. There was no getting around that painful truth.
“Ain’t no maybe, probably,” the merc insisted. “You did all this, you little shit. You don’t say no to Daniel Magnus.”
Victoria, with her hands covering her face, stepped up and shoved him away. “No one cares what you have to say. I want to hear from Bryce. He had a bad feeling when we came down here. We didn’t listen to you and now lo
ok where we are. What’s your feeling say now?”
“Not to go on.”
“We can’t go back,” Nichola said. “There’s a shit ton of ‘em back there. You can hear ‘em right?” The gibbering and the moaning was growing louder as they stood there.
“It doesn’t matter,” Victoria said. “Him and the fat…” Maddy was no longer the “fat chick.” She was three inches taller and although she wasn’t exactly slim, she was getting there fast. Victoria grimaced and amended her words to: “Him and her are different than us. They’re changing and…and one of the changes is like ESP or something. We need to listen to his feelings.”
Everyone stared. Bryce shrugged and said, “We shouldn’t go on.”
Nichola snorted, “That’s it? We shouldn’t go on? Fuck. Try a little harder. You know, search your feelings and all that shit.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Maddy snapped. “It just comes to us. It’s not magic. There are no signs from the heavens that point…”
Far down the tunnel in front of them, the golden lights began to flicker, then they went out all at once. A second later a high, wailing scream ripped up the tunnel from behind them. Sid and Nichola looked concerned, but the rest of them clung to each other. They had heard that scream before and knew that it was coming from one of the weird little zombies that scouted for the demons.
“Okay, maybe this ESP stuff is real,” Griff said, thankful that the dark hid the shaking in his hands. “We still need to do something and we need to do it now.”
Again, everyone looked at Bryce, and that included Maddy, which was infuriating, but understandable. If he could look to someone else, he would have. There’s always God. This would’ve been a laughable thought two days before. He had been a firm atheist, back when he had the world by the throat, back when he laughably thought he was the master of his own destiny.
Over the last forty-eight hours, he had begun to realize that God might be his only hope.
Of course, the city was strewn with the corpses of a million people, many of whom had believed the same thing. Were their deaths part of “God’s plan, too?” Bryce couldn’t know. He just knew he needed help. His own plan of going back and trying to fight through would result in at least half of them dying and that included himself.
For a brief moment, he looked up at the ceiling of the tunnel, wishing he knew a prayer that would help in this situation. As far as he knew zombies had been excluded from the Bible. With the dark, his eyes were wide open and it was in them that he felt the air around them move. It was less like a breath and more like a pulse…and there it was again. And again. “What is that?”
“What is what?” Griff asked, only to be shushed by Maddy.
She too was staring upwards as the pulsing grew. She put her hand on the damp wall. It vibrated under her hand like a car might under the influence of an over-sized stereo with the bass cranked to the max.
“Bombs,” she whispered. The moment she said this, she heard the rumble of explosions. A second later, Bryce heard it as well. Two seconds after that, the others heard them too. Maddy turned her head, her eyes tracing invisible lines on the wall. “They’re dropping west of us.” The moment she said this she felt another change in the air—a tiny puff that built into layers. It was a plane heading their way and at great speed. “I think I know what’s going to hap…”
The plane rocketed overhead, having released its payload of thousand-pound bombs seconds earlier. The bombers were targeting masses of the dead, and half a block from where Maddy stood with her eyes wide, hundreds of zombies were pouring down through one of the grates in the sidewalk. Dozens had already dropped down when the bomb struck with a brilliant, but hellish black and orange light.
In the tunnel, they were suddenly blinded as fire roared down the tracks. Framed against the fire was the group of limping refugees a hundred yards away. In front was the woman in the slicker. As the others turned and ran, she stood frozen as the flames swept right up to her. They melted her slicker and set her hair ablaze. Blind and screaming she fled, lighting the tunnel as the flames from the bombs winked out as quickly as they had come.
What came next was worse than the explosion and the fire. The roof of the tunnel began to collapse in a long wave as more bombs fell.
Everyone turned to run. Everyone but Bryce. He stood in their path, knowing that it was too late to run. They had missed their chance to run from this and now they were going to pay the price.
Chapter 41
Bryce grabbed Maddy and threw her bodily to the side where the tracks ran almost to the wall. Then he was sprinting along the rails, his nerve endings uselessly screaming to the point they felt electric. He was well past the need to sense danger, especially as he was racing towards where the ceiling was collapsing as more bombs hit.
“To the side!” he yelled, pushing faceless people to the wall as he ran past. He let his sword drop to give him more speed. He practically flew down the tracks, but he couldn’t out-race the bombs. Just as he made up the gap between the two groups, there was a flash of white light as a blast of super-heated air roiled over him, whipping his hair back. It was hurricane in its force and it stopped him dead in his tracks. The next thing he knew a writhing creature plowed into him. It felt like a child and he shoved it at the wall and pushed on, fighting the blazing wind and the torrent of dust and debris it carried.
Three steps on, he found two people huddled on the tracks. He screamed for them to move and heaved them out of the way just as another bomb struck somewhere above them.
It felt like a hot hand crushed him down to the ground, which no longer felt solid as the earth beneath him lifted and undulated like a wave. This scared him more than the bombs and he knew it would be suicide to go on; he’d be lucky to save himself.
With the roof disintegrating above him, he started crawling over broken slabs of concrete heading in the direction he hoped the wall lay. In the swirling dust, he found a body. Alive or dead, there was no time to find out. He began dragging it along, only to come across another—this one’s head was crushed beneath more concrete. He left it and kept going only to find yet another body; that of a child.
Feeling sick, he took the child in one arm and went back to pulling the other person to the shelter of the wall. It was ugly grey concrete, sticky with who knew what and smelled of piss. Still, it held up even as unnerving cracks ran along it as more explosions shook the ground. He huddled against it, shielding the two bodies with his own as bomb after bomb struck. The Air Force was releasing its arsenal on the city.
The five-hundred pounders had a distinctive crack to them and split the earth like a knife, while the thousand-pound bombs fwoomped into being and turned cement into ash in a blink. From where Bryce crouched in the darkness beneath the world, cluster munitions sounded like popcorn.
The last explosion defied all the rest in size and scope. It shook the ground for a minute straight and sucked the air from Bryce’s lungs. He feared it had been a nuclear bomb and that with every breath he was breathing in radioactive fallout. If so, there was nothing that could be done.
Eventually, the earth stopped shaking, and Bryce pushed himself up, grimacing as he did. Somewhere along the way, he had lost a chunk of flesh from his left arm. Surprisingly, it wasn’t bleeding nearly as badly as he expected and was already clotting. But there was blood all around him in an iron-smelling pool. Most of it came from the child he had saved. A falling rock had knocked him unconscious, while a second had nearly taken off his hand. It was hanging by a bit of flesh and a white line of tendon. From his torn arteries, dribbled the last of his blood. He had bled out with Bryce huddled over him, doing nothing.
“That’s Ryan,” Audrey Brooke said in a bone-weary voice. She was the other person Bryce had dragged away from the tracks. Blood tricked from her blonde hair and more stained her shoulder and ran down one arm. She had no idea why she was hurting or really where she was. The last thing she remembered were the lights going out. She knew Ryan,
however.
“He lived in my building. Him and his mom and dad. He was a good kid. I babysat him a few times and he was really a good one. When you get a boy, you never know what you’re going to get. But he was good.” A tear worked its way through the grime on her cheek and dropped to her chest. “His mom was with him…” She tried to look around but a searing pain stopped her. “Did another train get us?”
“No. Bombs.” Ignoring his own pain, he stood and dug his fists into the small of his back. There was diffused grey “light” that filtered down from the broken ceiling of the tunnel. Within it, he could see that a few others were getting to their feet as well. “Can you stand?”
Audrey twisted a little, grimaced in pain, and then slumped, looking down at herself in horror. “I can’t feel my legs. Jesus. Mister, I can’t feel my legs.”
“No? Maybe it’s a spasm or a pinched nerve.” Bryce was grasping for straws as he knelt back down to inspect her wound. Gently he rolled her over and saw that the lower part of her coat was torn open and there was a cascade of tiny downy feathers. “There’s no blood,” he said, hoping this was a good sign. She was skinny and as he lifted her coat and shirt, he saw the ridges of her vertebrae clearly. They started off all in a line, neat as dominoes; however, at the base of her spine they were crushed and mangled.
To the right of her spine, in soft area beneath her ribs and above her hip, the flesh was so purple as to appear black. He touched it, and felt the warmth and knew that her kidney had been destroyed and that she was bleeding internally. A shiver racked him. She was going to die. Her only chance to live was if they crawled out of the rubble and found a hospital across the street with a fully equipped operating room ready to go and a surgical team on standby.
Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling Page 30