“I don’t have to sit around for this shit,” Whittaker said, rising to leave. He wanted to punch Tom, but he knew he would be able to restrain his desire because only one person would be hurt by the action: Jessica. Jessica grabbed his arm and encouraged Whittaker to sit back down.
“Well, I’m going to carry on telling you what we think is happening. You can choose to believe it or not,” Jessica persisted. Time to lay it all out.
She told him everything, although much of what she had experienced was still a mystery to her and to those like her. Despite the insane proposition she put forward, the conviction in her voice slowly began to win Tom over. Really, was it any different to the stuff he had once believed himself? Remote Viewing, Astral Projection, shape-shifting, pan-dimensional space lizards? The more he thought about it, the more what she said seemed to fit into his own warped narrative.
“I’ve got to say, it sounds crazy,” Tom said. “But then, five days ago, I would have said that about the undead walking the Earth.”
“Exactly,” said Jessica. “So do you believe us?”
“Let us just say I am willing to accept the possibility that what you say is true. How does that affect me?” Jessica gave Whittaker a sly look before leaning forward to grab her brother’s hand.
“Tom, we need some of your amphetamines.”
“What?”
“Come on Tom, I know you have a stash.”
“Don’t talk….” Tom started to deny what was actually true and caught himself. He had never been able to lie to his sister.
“Mum told me, alright. You didn’t actually think she would keep something like that from me, did you?” Years ago, Tom had found he didn’t have enough hours in the day and had started abusing first legally and then illegally acquired amphetamines to reduce his need for sleep. He had managed to break the habit he had formed but still felt the need to bomb occasionally. He had been worried about his own addiction and had sought his mother’s advice. She hadn’t initially felt the need to share the secret with Tom’s other siblings because that was just the kind of worried mother she was, keeping her concerns to herself. But when Jessica had arrived at the farm, she had noticed the uncharacteristic behaviour of Tom to the new arrivals. He was too agitated, too anxious, unnaturally aggressive. A what’s up with Tom mum? had finally allowed Judy Dunn to unload the burden she was carrying.
Tom shook his head in resignation.
“I’m not addicted, okay. I only take them to stay alert,” Tom said in his own defence.
“Well, we need them now as well. And I’m not judging you, Tom. You were the one who set all this up, saw this madness coming and made a safe place for us all.”
“Why do you need them?” asked Tom.
“Because we need to avoid sleep,” Whittaker answered. “While we can’t be certain we will be safe from what is coming after us when we are wide awake, it’s better than risking the nightmare until we absolutely have to.”
“That’s why Azrael had to leave, to go after those who are after us in the dreams,” Jessica added.
“Yeah, with my bloody Land Rover. I still can’t believe you talked me into that.”
“I told you, you did that for all of us.” She leaned forward, grabbing his hand, her eyes searching for the love in his heart. “So Tom, have you got enough for the pair of us?”
“Oh yes,” Tom said with a sudden twinkle in his eye. “Don’t you remember? I was preparing for the end of the world.”
24.08.19
Newark, USA
Gabriel discovered that he tired quicker than usual, his physiology still a long way from recovering. The fact that he was cold and wet didn’t help, the swim across the Hackensack River arduous for him. Just that and walking the miles from the station where he had emerged from the underground had resulted in a tiredness that was alien to him. He’d needed to hide twice from the army, still not trusting that they would mean anything but trouble for him.
The bank he found was of a sturdy stone construction, its windows high and barred, its main door thick and formidable. This was the place for him to rest, the interior empty. It had been ransacked, the front door left open by whoever had been here before him. Who would go out of their way to steal cash when the end of the world was ripping the heart out of everything?
There had been similar signs of such stupidity, shop windows shattered so that mindless cretins could steal TVs and electrical goods that likely now wouldn’t even work. More sense was seen by the multiple stores that had been stripped of food and drink. Despite the soldiers trying to keep order, the chaos had already thundered through, destroying all sense of social unity, corrupting the area which most people had now fled from. He had seen a few curtains twitch, window blinds pulled aside, but to find anyone here in this part of Newark would be a rarity.
His available weapons had been increased by a fortuitous find. On his journey here, he had come across a gun shop that had been broken into and all but emptied. Not everything had been stripped from that store, and he had come away with a semi-automatic shotgun, and a shit load of ammunition. It wasn’t the gun he wanted, but it was the best that he was likely to find under what Gabriel considered to be the area’s archaic gun laws. What he really wanted was an AA-12 fully automatic combat shotgun. That would make mincemeat out of anything. Still, six loaded rounds were better than nothing. He had seen the limitation in stopping power his Glock represented.
The door to the bank closed easily, and he tried to engage the deadbolt to stop others following. Unfortunately, the locking mechanism had been shattered. It closed, but it wouldn’t keep anything out for long, which was a problem. Awake he was formidable, even in his depleted state. Asleep, a child could take him with a sharpened penknife. Still, he was sure this would be the best option for him to find a safe place to sleep if he could get access to the vault.
The daylight filtered through the bank windows causing visible beams to slowly move across the littered floor’s surface.
“Hello,” Gabriel shouted. His gun ready in case anything decided to run at him. Nothing moved in the darkened unseen places, Gabriel moving further into the bank. “Hello,” he demanded again. “If you are hiding and I find you, I will kill you. Come out now, and I will permit you to leave.” That was a lie. He would kill anyone and anything he felt threatened him.
There was a dead body lying in the bank’s foyer. An open bag lay at its side, wads of notes spilling from it. It was the zombie apocalypse, and somebody had tried to rob a bank? There was a respirator on the dead man’s head, and Gabriel stripped it off to look at the face. The dead eyes stared back at him, their secrets forever lost to the world. He didn’t need the respirator for his own protection. There was nothing else of any use, any weapons likely taken by the person who had shot the man.
Nothing seemed to hear his promise, and Gabriel made his way to the back of the bank, snaking through offices that had once been home to deals and transactions likely reaching millions of dollars. The rear exits to the bank were all secure, and he ventured further to the first floor on heavy legs, making sure to fully clear the building. The first office he found had a plush leather sofa, and he suddenly found himself yearning for comfort. That was a distraction Gabriel could resist, and he cleared the floor quickly, confirming nobody else was present. Job done, he returned to the first office.
Standing in the doorway, his mind drifted, something else that was rare for him. Normally he was focused with clarity of vision and purpose. The email he had received still grated with him, and a part of him felt lost as to his place in the world. Sooner or later, his need to survive would end, and the other human needs would come rushing to the forefront of his consciousness.
Most of those needs had been met by killing in the name of Gaia, but Gaia wasn’t a part of him anymore. He still intended to head North, but something felt out of place with that plan, something he had never felt before. Gabriel found himself suddenly afraid about how he would handle being truly alone.
If he had been given the vaccine, didn’t that mean that Gaia still needed him on some level?
It was an emotion he was unfamiliar with. It wasn’t so much caused by a lack of human contact, but by a lack of definite purpose. Ever since he had been reborn, he had always thought he understood his place in the world. That understanding had now been stripped from him, leaving a well-trained, but barren husk of a man. The skills he possessed were easily transferable to self-preservation and survival, but that wasn’t enough for him. He needed something to fight for, and the preservation of his own wellbeing wasn’t enough.
Outside, rain began to fall, hard. The windows almost shook with the force that pounded on them, the downpour of no concern to the zombies that were out there. Zombies didn’t get cold or need shelter, and the wet wouldn’t bring them to hypothermia. They were immune to the ravages of nature, possibly even able to survive the roasting heat of forest fires. Sooner or later, he knew he would have to face them.
Sooner it seemed if the gunfire he heard outside was anything to go by.
***
John’s day had descended into a mound of shit that he was not enjoying. He’d needed to shoot the man driving the Humvee, the car having to be abandoned due to all the streets being blocked. Losing his respirator, the driver had clearly ended up getting infected, the signs clear. John didn’t consider the act heartless, quite the opposite. The soldier who he been serving with for two years had asked to be put out of his misery.
“Don’t let me turn into one of those things.” The driver may have been of a lower rank, but as a soldier, he was John’s equal. There were just three of them now, himself, his Sergeant and someone who was a complete waste of the air he breathed. To top it off they were all now soaked through by the rain.
“I can’t go on no further,” Gianni implored. He had been slowing them down ever since they abandoned the SUV due to the roads becoming impassable. If he were lighter, they would have carried him, but as it was, they had to do what they could to help the man keep up. If he hadn’t been immune, John would have left him.
John was still being advised of where the undead were, the Predator drone still circling above them. Through Carson, John had been able to call up some air strikes to slow the undead’s pursuit down, several streets still burning behind them. They were far from safe, however. The streets here were chaos, impassable by anything but a motorbike…which was probably why there were no motorbikes visible just lying around.
“I need to rest,” Gianni insisted. His face was beet red, and John reckoned if they went any further the idiot might end up having a heart attack. The other soldier fired off a shot, a lone zombie falling to the dust twenty metres away. Clearly, the undead were still after them.
“Alpha team to control, any word on that backup?” At least his radio still worked. If he lost his communications, John reckoned he would be done for.
“Please hold, Alpha team. No support units available at this time.”
The Sergeant fired again, and John grabbed Gianni and literally pulled him towards the bank on the street corner.
“We can rest in there.”
The three of them hit the front door of the bank running. It opened fairly easily, and Gianni stumbled inside, sitting down on the first chair he found. John and his partner closed the door and began moving heavy desks against it. The marble floor of the bank made that relatively easy, although they had to move the furniture a fair distance.
“I don’t know if that will hold,” the Sergeant said. Clearly, it wouldn’t.
“Let’s see if there’s a back way out.” John was about to say something more, but he was interrupted by a stranger’s voice.
“Back’s all locked up tight,” Gabriel said, descending the stairs. He had his hands in the air to show he wasn’t a threat. “I’m guessing there are zombies right behind you?” John swivelled to the voice, his AR15 aimed at Gabriel’s head. It took John two seconds to assess Gabriel, and he indicated that the stranger could lower his hands.
“Yep,” John said, “whole bunch of them right behind. Sorry for bringing them to you.”
“I’m sure they would have found me in time. I had planned to sleep in the vault. Perhaps now might be an opportune time to venture there.” Gabriel didn’t wait for confirmation, he was already making his way there now. At the front, something smashed itself into the bank’s main door. The barricade held, but only just. Now inside, the smell of Gianni was already dissipating outside. Unfortunately, the dead were already here. The three men followed Gabriel, still wary of the threat he might pose.
They walked past the cashier’s windows, and into a large open plan office area. Further along, a door led down to the basement. The sound of a desk screeching across the floor put a degree of urgency in their strides. Before descending, John sent his GPS coordinates off to the person at the other end of his radio. When they went down there, the reception was likely to get a bit unpredictable.
“Roger, Alpha team. I will try and get an extraction team to your location.”
John wouldn’t be holding his breath.
24.08.19
Stockport, UK
Trouble kept seeming to find Azrael. One minute he was walking over a railway bridge, the next he was running for his life.
Most of the railway line here was raised above ground and through heavily built-up areas. He could have tried to take a long detour around the more populated regions, but he reckoned, correctly as it turned out, that most parts of the region would be flooded with both panicked people and the ravenous undead. There would be no getting around it, so the only way was through.
Right now, it was the undead who were chasing him, and dropping his backpack, he turned and knelt, allowing him to fire off several shots. His accuracy didn’t fail him. The zombies had been passing on the road below the railway bridge, at least thirty of them, and they reacted instantly as soon as they got Azrael’s scent. He had been lucky. Had the wind been blowing the other way, they would have detected him much sooner, and likely more would have come for him.
Three zombies fell, but more appeared, clambering up the side of the bridge with a strength and an agility Azrael knew he could never match. What gave the undead their edge was their complete lack of concern for the health of their own bodies, willingly ripping fingernails out and breaking bones just so that they could get their teeth into something particularly juicy. They were also relentless, never even able to consider giving up. The undead wanted the flesh of man, and as an immune, Azrael was the juiciest of them all.
He emptied out a magazine, felling more of the creatures that came at him in their silent fury. With his adrenaline high and his heart pumping, destroying the part of the brain that mattered was a difficult shot to make. Some of his bullets found their mark, only for the zombie to keep on at him. His finger clicked on empty again, and he ripped the magazine out and slammed in a fresh one.
The thing that saved him was the difficulty the undead had at getting to him on the railway line. They could climb the side of the bridge easily, but only at certain points, meaning their heads and bodies appeared into view in threes and fours. It gave him precious seconds, fleeting moments to line up his shots at the zombies that were no more than ten metres away. With three left by his reckoning, the unthinkable happened.
His gun jammed.
The bullet he had expected to come rocketing out of the end of the suppressed barrel got stuck, making his gun less useful than a club. Azrael instantly discarded it, pulling out his pistol, knowing the stopping power would be limited. The three undead charged at him with speed faster than he could run over this gravel-strewn and uneven ground, so he knew his only chance was to stay and fight. As the three hurtled towards him, two more undead scaled the stone of the bridge, the last one being a beast of a former man.
His bullets were true, but his pistol’s accuracy and stopping power didn’t match the C8 CQB Carbine he had been relying on. It took a full clip to down the first three zombies, and
by then the last two were nearly on him. Dropping the gun, he went to his last resort.
His blessed knives, given to him by Mother herself.
The first of the two to get near him had once been a child, and it leapt into the air as it came in reach, aiming itself straight for Azrael’s upper body, intent on clinging on to give it a chance to bite at his face. Azrael aimed the sidekick well, stopping the zombie in mid-air, sending it sprawling backwards where it landed harshly, scrabbling on the floor. The larger zombie paid its smaller counterpart no heed, stepping on it, the sound of the child(Z)’s knee dislocating ricocheting around the surroundings. A kick wouldn’t stop this beast, clearly the result of someone who had lived for the power he could gain by lifting weights. Whether that was supported by the use of illicit steroids was no concern to Azrael. All that mattered was how big the thing was, and as it stampeded at him, Azrael sidestepped at the last minute, tripping the zombie that still lacked the nuances of fine motor control.
Still, the zombie almost brought him down, clawing fingers mere centimetres from snagging his clothes. The behemoth landed on the tracks face first, and Azrael pounced, forcing both of his knives deep into the back of the zombie’s neck. On a human, that would have damaged the spinal cord, and as the thing tried to buck and push itself up off the floor, Azrael struck again, withdrawing and thrusting the right-handed knife into the base of the zombie’s neck. That stilled it.
His safety was fleeting though, for the child zombie had already recovered. Despite its damaged leg, it clawed its way onto Azrael’s back, the fingers tearing at whatever they could. The teeth tried to bite into his neck, but the duct tape he had wrapped around the collar of his military fatigues acted as an effective barrier against milk teeth that in the child before had already started to loosen. With the thing clinging to him, Azrael aimed his knives and flung his arms behind him, intent on stabbing the zombie in the back. Multiple times he did so, the bastard thing hardly seeming to care.
The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 3): The Fall Page 35