The Gristle & Bone Series (Book 1): The Flayed & The Dying
Page 19
Sharpe grimaced. “Fall back,” he said quietly, and then louder so his voice carried. “Fall back!”
Thaniel was already running, shouting over his shoulder, “It’s time to go!”
As if reacting to his words, the body of Ryan suddenly sat up, lurching forward into a sitting position as if resuscitated from death by an invisible defibrillator. He screeched, turning his pitted gaze up at Sharpe, who put a bullet into the sailor’s forehead and cut the screeching short.
Sharpe and his men broke into a run behind Thaniel who was already yards ahead. As they ran, the skeletal former sailors began erupting from death, landing on all fours like scuttling spiders. The men fired their weapons at the newly awakened dead. Sharpe’s man, Cooper, was tackled to the ground for his efforts, bitten in the shoulder by a ghoul’s gnashing teeth. Sharpe skidded to a stop, calling out to his man, but Hyres and Maldonado were already there, killing the attacker with their rifles and scooping up their injured teammate by his armpits. They carried him between them while Neto hung back, keeping the dead at bay with covering fire.
It wasn’t enough.
A skeletal came roaring up through the mob and leapt over Neto, dodging the gunfire sent its way. It landed on the injured Cooper’s back, stabbing frantically. Before Sharpe could fire on the creature, the thing’s pronged ulna came stabbing down through Cooper’s neck, killing him instantly.
Neto fired on the thing until it died screeching while Hyres and Maldonado moved in to drag their comrade’s body away, unwilling to leave him behind.
Sharpe blasted a skeletal off the wall and blew another’s face in as it leapt across the distance to land at his feet. He roared his frustration as he unloaded into the thing until it died. He looked up and realization hit hard when he saw the dead were closing in, they were low on ammunition, and the body of Cooper was slowing them down. He made a decision. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he’d made when he brought the infected bodies of Merrill, Grim and Salim aboard. The same mistake that had caused all of this.
“Drop him, Hyres,” Sharpe called.
“Fuck that, boss!” yelled Maldonado, but Hyres obeyed and dropped his dead comrade’s arm. Maldonado swore and did the same, whispering a quick apology in Spanish as Cooper’s body hit the deck with a thud.
They left him behind to be trampled by the incoming dead.
The men formed a firing line along the narrow width of the corridor, backstepping as they let loose volley after volley. But there were too many of the creatures, screeching and scattering to avoid the bullets.
They were still closing in.
Then, suddenly, the ship listed hard to port and they were slammed against the bulkhead. Before they could register what was happening, the corridor imploded from the starboard side and a grey wall of steel cut through the passageway, cutting the creatures off from the retreating men. Their world was filled with the almost unbearable sounds of crunching, tearing metal and snapping wires and pipes. Waifs of smoke appeared, sending the men into coughing fits as they rose shakily to their feet
They didn’t waste time trying to figure out what the wall was or where it had come from. Instead, they turned and ran through the tilted ship, ascending ladders with difficulty and fleeing down passageways, until they found themselves standing at the entrance to Harig’s stateroom. The door was ajar and there, inside, quivering legs kicked out from behind a low table.
Thaniel followed the men inside and they slowly approached the spasming limbs. As they drew closer, a corpse came into view, sitting on its knees and chewing on the torso of Harig, lying prone on the floor. The captain’s eyes were wide with shock and one of his hands was gone, rendered down to a bloody stump. Strips of grisly meat dangled from the feasting corpse’s teeth.
“Holy sh-” Maldonado muttered.
The thing snarled at them and Sharpe put a bullet through its forehead. Harig’s eyes tracked sideways to stare at the group.
“Captain.” Sharpe said, kneeling to comfort the dying man. He put his hand on Harig’s shoulder, unsure of what to say.
As the operators surrounded the captain, Thaniel walked over to a nearby porthole and peered outside. Through the falling rain, he saw the reason behind the sudden wall of metal below. Another massive Federation ship was impaled into their own vessel, its crumpled bow thrust deep into the Defiant’s starboard side so that the Defiant was almost rendered in half by the T-bone collision.
Thaniel looked up at the intersecting ship’s weather deck and he swallowed a curse. Like some haunted ship of old, it was covered with the dead. Crawling skeletals and corpses ran about in tattered, blood-spattered navy uniforms chasing down screaming sailors or clambering over deck guns and radar aerials. Across the distance, he could hear their clicking, shrieking, and moaning through the rain.
“Sharpe?” Thaniel said, without taking his eyes off the scene. “Hey guys? We have to get out of here. Now.”
On the floor, the dying Harig garbled words through blood. “Go… Shi…loh. Shi…loh. Only…way…out.”
Sharpe repeated the words, trying to make sense of them until their meaning was clear. “The Shiloh’s here?”
Harig gave a slight nod and pointed his index finger from his one remaining hand towards the porthole where Thaniel stood. When he recognized Thaniel, Harig’s face took on a look of confusion. He opened his mouth to speak, but the light behind his eyes went out before the words ever came.
He died there.
Sharpe put a bullet through the captain’s head before regaining his feet. He came to stand next to Thaniel and peered out the porthole.
“I’m not getting off this ship, just to get on that death trap,” Thaniel said, nodding at the ship grinding into theirs.
“That’s the Jaeger, not the Shiloh.”
“Then where the hell is the Shiloh?”
“There.” Sharpe said, pointing to some unseen thing beyond the Jaeger.
“I don’t see it.”
Sharpe didn’t reply. Instead he turned, barking out orders to his men to find raingear, anything they could use to take cover from the falling weather.
The operators ransacked Harig’s stateroom, taking clothing from the dead captain’s closets and drawers. They threw on coats, placed socks over their hands and wrapped their heads and faces with shirts until they looked like Bedouin tribesmen, completely covered save for their eyes. Thaniel, still confused as to where they were going, did the same.
“The rain is coming down pretty heavily,” Sharpe said. “It won’t take long for the water to soak through, so run like hell. We make our way there,” he pointed through the window to an area of weather deck beyond the Jaeger. “And we make the leap.”
“We’re jumping into the water? What about the infection?” Thaniel asked, unsure with the plan.
Sharpe shrugged. “Let’s hope the infection’s just in the rain, and not the sea,” he said, walking past Thaniel and his men. “Let’s go.”
Sharpe led the way as they stepped out of the stateroom and ran down the hall, ignoring the screaming that seemed to follow them. Sometimes a dead thing would stumble around a corner, coming out into the space in front of them, only to be quickly dispatched by the operators who didn’t even slow to take aim. As he watched each corpse go down, Thaniel was grateful to be surrounded by the team of professional killers, despite the unfortunate circumstances that had brought him into their company.
They quickly found themselves at an open doorway that led outside and into the rain. They stopped, just at the threshold, to take stock of the situation. Outside, their field of vision was partially blocked by the looming superstructure of the Jaeger, rising and falling with the waves below like some slumbering beast. Each time its bow rose and dropped, more and more of the Defiant’s starboard side caved in beneath it. The Defiant, quickly taking on water, had ceased its list toward port, and was now instead listing heavily toward starboard.
The ship would not stay afloat for much longer.
The Shiloh.
“Ready?” Sharpe asked, turning to them. His men nodded, and so did Thaniel, albeit hesitantly.
They stepped across the threshold and into the pouring rain.
Outside, the dead aboard the Jaeger screeched at the sight of emerging prey. Several dozen creatures leapt from the ship to land with heavy thuds on the Defiant’s deck, lurching into a chase as soon as they touched down.
“Run!”
Thaniel and the operators dashed towards the horizon with the dead close on their heels. As the deck’s edge loomed closer, Thaniel willed himself not to slow, not to stop.
Keep going.
They threw themselves overboard and into the frigid waters of Boston Harbor below. The dead rained down after them.
-50-
Alone on the empty street, the once-Burome brought the slab of its tongue to the asphalt and tasted the spilt blood of the unchanged that had died there. It was a seedling now, and the once-Burome sensed its presence somewhere in the horde beyond, moving away from the city to seek out more unchanged and devour them into the horde.
The once-Burome sent itself through the mind-web, tunneling through the darkness until it found itself behind the open, unblinking eyes of the newly changed seedling. It opened its mind to what the seedling was experiencing and saw through it the overcast clouds above. It felt its jaw hanging half-open and a hungry death rattle escaping its throat. The once-Burome leveled the seedling’s head to scan its surroundings, and it was filled with satisfaction at the sight of hundreds of unchanged fleeing before it. All around, the once-Burome saw thousands of its horde advancing on a suburban neighborhood, pulling screaming unchanged from their homes and cars to devour them on their lawns. As they died, it felt their minds flooding in to join the horde’s mind-web.
When they woke, they would be of the horde.
The seedling it occupied suddenly broke into a stiff ambling jog and the once-Burome growled hungrily. The seedling was merely that, a seedling, and thus could not move with the same speed and grace as its superior Others; but it was enough. It tackled an elder unchanged as she stumbled in her haste to get away, gnashing its teeth through hands she raised in defense. It brought its jaws snapping downwards, eating into the screaming elder before it felt itself being jostled. The once-Burome swiveled the seedling’s head and saw that it had been joined by others that crowded around its kill, tearing at the female and using their hands to pull away meat.
The once-Burome spilled its mind into all of them, so that they became one and it could enjoy its meal in peace.
As they feasted, a noise from above suddenly tore across the sky. The once-Burome turned their heads to stare and they snarled at what they sensed up there.
The Foul One.
The memory of the girl.
Weakness.
The thought had the once-Burome hurtling backwards through the horde’s consciousness, expelled from the seedlings’ minds like discarded waste. It found itself back in its own body, miles away, alone on a city street and furious at its dismissal. It tuned into the mind-web and quickly rebound the horde to its will before its infirmity was known amongst the others.
Too late.
It sensed the information spreading, knowledge of its vulnerability disseminating across the hivemind. The Others immediately began pulling at their reigns, testing the once-Burome’s will for weakness. It snapped the reigns taught, demanding obedience, until eventually their insolence faded and the once-Burome again felt confident in its control.
Above, the overcast sky crackled as the storm moved in from the harbor. It felt wet drops of rain begin to fall upon its fossilized shoulders. Through the wind, it sensed where the storm would roam next, moving inland. The once-Burome sent orders into the horde, maneuvering its war chiefs to track ahead of the storm so that they would be there to take any newly turned Others and bring them, too, into the fold.
The once-Burome stood up on two legs, raised its antlers to the sky, and roared into the storm with joy. The rain would bring with it the promise of new alphas to conquer, new battles to win.
It broke into a sprint down the street, intent on joining its advancing horde.
-51-
Dr. Francesca Holloway awoke in the middle of the night to the high-pitched whine of failing machinery. It grew louder and angrier until it crescendoed into an explosion loud enough to shake the walls of the bunker and rain dust from the ceiling. Moments later, she heard the rat-tat-tat of semi-automatic weapons.
She was no longer alone.
Beneath the desk, Francesca sat upright in her makeshift bed and scrambled to her feet.
The room she occupied was small and barely furnished. Other than the desk and the pile of blankets beneath it that she used as a bed, there was just a chair, and a mini fridge in the corner. The space was dimly lit by a solitary light bulb that hung from the ceiling, which she refused to turn off even when she went to sleep. She hated being in the dark with the blood-splattered wall at the front of the room, the one adorned with chains that had once held Dr. Neyra’s test subjects. In the beginning, when she had first taken refuge in the place, she could have sworn the chains rattled in her sleep. Now she always kept the light on, lest the specters of Neyra’s victims returned to haunt her in the dark.
And then, of course, there was the door, the entry to the underground tunnel that led to the other buildings in the facility. There was a bar that went across that, barricading it from entry from the other side.
Francesca ran past the crimson and grisly wall and up the stairs to the bunker’s only other door. There she paused, listening to the events outside. Among the continued sounds of gunfire, she heard the shouts of men and the shrieking and howling of stonemen. She cracked the door open wide enough for wind and snow to rush at her through the gap and peered outside.
It was night and another snowstorm was raging.
Beyond the darkness, less than half a kilometer away, Francesca saw great tendrils of flame reaching up towards the night sky, erupting from some unknown structure, its warmth muted across the distance. Silhouetted against the flames were running figures and the unmistakable flashes of gunfire. The figures moved strategically towards the facility, leapfrogging past one another as they provided covering fire. Then, as she watched, one of the shooters was tackled from the side and carried away into the night by a howling form. The other gunmen shouted after their comrade, firing into the black. They moved to follow him when another running figure came out of the darkness, shrieking and stabbing at the group member farthest to the rear. The remaining men rounded on the attacker, concentrating their gunfire. The thing squealed and died from the onslaught, but so too did its victim.
There were only three shooters left now. They kept moving, firing their weapons and shouting encouragement at each other.
“Do not slow, do not look back!”
It wasn’t enough.
Figures whipped through the dark in a mad, snarling sprint. She hastily closed the door, lest one of the creatures saw and came for her, too. It was from behind the closed door that she listened to the ending of the battle and the demise of the men, when the gunfire and screaming dwindled away and eventually ceased altogether.
The rising wind drowned out the sounds of wet feasting that she knew would follow.
She was alone again.
Francesca turned and descended back down the stairs, returning to her makeshift bed beneath the desk. As her hopes for rescue faded, a frightened, fitful sleep took over.
The room of course hadn’t changed when she awoke the next morning. There was no window to let in any natural light, and so the space was as dim and dreary as ever. She was hungry, but she was always hungry. To fill the void in her stomach, she proceeded back upstairs to
collect snow from just outside the bunker’s entrance. When she opened the door and was greeted by the low twilight of a looming Arctic winter, she spotted the charred husk of a plane in the distance.
The events of the previous night had been real and not a bad dream, after all.
Francesca stared at the wreckage for several minutes, deciding. She hadn’t left the bunker since the walking corpses of Dr. Kattar and Dr. Angelo had chased her down there in the aftermath of Dr. Neyra’s sabotage. What meager food supplies had been left in the mini fridge below, she’d already eaten. She had sustained herself on snowmelt since.
Her stomach rumbled.
Whoever those men were, wherever they had come from, surely they had to have supplies.
She made her decision. She returned downstairs and grabbed her filthy lab coat. It was the only clothing she had besides what she was already wearing. It would not be enough to hold back the cold, but it was better than nothing. She returned to the door and stepped outside.
The wind howled and bit, kicking up flurries of ice that snapped at her legs. Her feet sank in the deep snowdrifts, stopping just above the knee and slowing her progress towards the plane. She tucked her chin, pulled her lab coat taut over her shoulders, and trudged through the cold determined to get to the wreck before frostbite set in.
At all times, she kept her mind and ears alert for the sounds of the dead.
Halfway there, she saw drops of blood speckled around footprints that headed back towards the facility.
The men from last night had already transitioned.
Francesca pressed on until she was close enough to the wreck to confirm her suspicions that the plane was military. Strewn about the wreckage were partially buried strips of light fabric that whipped and slithered with the wind. It took her a moment to realize she was looking at the tattered remains of parachutes. She followed the remains of one of the chutes until she came upon a frozen corpse, half interred in a snowdrift. The thing didn’t move as she approached, never opened its eyes or turned towards her. Whoever the man was, he’d died naturally and uninfected. It was a better death than his comrades who had made it safely to the ground.