by Brown, TW
It was the fourth room where their luck changed. Joel had looked inside and seen exactly what he’d expected. Three individuals were at the window with rifles. Once again, Joel slipped into the room intent on taking down the first target and utilizing the element of surprise to eliminate these people.
As soon as he heard the sound, he cursed himself for being so foolhardy. He’d barely registered that the door to the right as he entered was almost completely shut. He felt more than heard it open and turned to see a young man exit the suite’s bathroom. The only thing that saved him was that this person, who could be no older than sixteen, was perhaps more stunned.
With his handgun resting impotently in its holster, Joel’s only choice was to throw his knife. He exhaled his relief when it buried itself in the young man’s chest. The kid crumpled, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, blood trickling from the corners of it, and eyes wide in fear and confusion. For a moment, Joel’s mind flashed to a similar reaction from a young boy in the jungles of Vietnam who’d suffered a similar fate at Joel’s hands. Just as fast as it came, he shoved it away. Now was not the time, and he spun to see all three people at the window turning to see what the ruckus was about.
He saw three rifles come up almost in unison. His only choice was to dive behind the bed. He rolled to his side and found himself staring into the pleading eyes of the young man with the knife still jutting from his chest. Glancing toward the open door, he saw one of the bikers peek around the corner and then stumble back when what could only have been a lucky (or unlucky depending on a person’s perspective) shot caught the man in the face, sending him staggering back to slump against the wall across the hall.
There was a single second where silence seemed to fall upon the room right before total hell broke loose.
The doorway suddenly filled with leather-clad bikers all wielding pistols and even a few shotguns. The three people at the window never had a chance to fire a second volley.
However, the shouts that came from down the hall let Joel know that their presence was probably no longer a secret. He climbed to his knees and swapped the magazine in his pistol to ensure he went into the coming fight fully loaded.
“Get in here, you idiots!” he snarled at the few individuals still standing in the hallway.
“What the fuck, boss?” Debra elbowed Joel. “How do you walk past a closed door and not at least nudge it open?”
“Out of practice,” he admitted with a shrug.
“Maybe you let the pros start leading the assault until you get rid of the rust.” She didn’t even have the courtesy to phrase it as a question, but Joel knew deep down that she was at least partially correct. Partially, because she should also know better than to do this in front of the troops.
Poking her head out the doorway at below waist height to minimize being seen—or if she was spotted, sighted in on and shot—Debra scanned the hall. She ducked back in quickly as a volley of gunfire sounded, shards of wood and chunks of the wall flew.
“Yep, element of surprise is FUBAR,” she hissed as she plucked a nasty looking three-inch splinter of wood from her cheek.
Joel watched as she holstered her weapon and pulled the grenade launcher from her shoulder. She patted it as the bikers gaped. “This is the difference between the pros and the Joes,” she said with a deadly glimmer in her eyes.
“We picked the right team,” one of the bikers gasped.
“Yeah.” Debra stepped up to the man, her gaze boring into his. “You might want to be sure and remember that if you ever decide to bail on us.”
She stood there for what felt like hours but could only have been seconds before stepping back and smiling. That smile had to be what a polar bear flashed when it considered a baby seal, Joel thought with an approving shudder. He watched her as she loaded the M203 grenade launcher and then waited for the bullets to stop flying before she stepped out into the hallway and returned fire.
She hopped back in the room as a mixture of shouts and sporadic gunfire started. A few seconds later, there was a floor-shaking explosion followed by a heartbeat of silence…and then the moans of the dead or dying. She quickly reloaded, popped out, and fired again. Joel was pretty certain that the second round was overkill.
He started for the doorway, but Debra put an arm up. “Give them a second to bleed out,” she said like it was an absolutely normal thing to say.
Joel shrugged and waited as she popped her head out and then ducked back just as a few shots rang out. She looked back at Joel and smiled. “Gotta give ‘em credit for spunk.”
After another minute, Debra emerged once more. This time she stood in the center of the hall and just waited. When nothing happened, the rest of the group followed Joel out.
The corridor was a nightmare of gore. Bodies had been blown apart in many instances and others were scorched or charred beyond recognition. The smell was one that Joel knew well, but a few of the bikers stopped, hands on knees as they threw up the contents of their stomachs.
He’d gone only a few steps when somebody staggered out of a door just a few feet away. Debra stepped over and shoved a knife Joel hadn’t even seen her pull into the side of the man’s throat. Up ahead another two individuals came out with weapons drawn. Joel and Debra dove into the nearest open door, as did a few of the bikers.
A couple didn’t make it, and Joel rolled over to see a woman looking at him, her eyes already glazed over. Joel got to his knees as the two individuals came running. He almost felt bad when they reached his open doorway and were met with a hail of bullets.
The last words to be uttered by the pair had something to do with “Glory to God!” or something to that effect. He moved behind Debra who’d just peered around the corner. She leaned forward and then stepped back into the hallway.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she sing-songed as she pulled the pistol-grip shotgun from the custom holster she had on her hip.
There was a stirring, and then a woman emerged from the doorway just three down from where they now stood. She was tall and thin to the point of gaunt. Her black hair was pulled up in a severe bun that, even from a distance, Joel could see that her eyes were almost slanted to the point of being reduced to slits making them seem to be nothing more than dark specks on her pale face. Her thin lips were downturned in a perpetual frown, and her cheeks were flushed just as he’d imagined.
For being so skinny, her breasts were large and on the verge of comical. Joel briefly wondered if she walked so stiffly in order to keep from tumbling forward.
“You will not defile the lambs of God!” she shrieked, her voice going shrill as she yelled the words far too loud considering they were not more than twenty feet away.
“We aren’t here to defile anybody.” Joel stepped forward. “In fact…” Joel raised his own voice in hopes that he might be heard by some of the individuals that could possibly be on the fence. “And if some of you are here against your will, then you can leave unharmed if you go right now.”
“Pay them no heed, my children,” the woman railed. “This is the voice of the Great Deceiver speaking to you through this vessel. He is here to lead you to eternal damnation and only wishes for you to share in the torment he will reap based on his life of sin.”
“Do you actually believe the stuff pouring out of your mouth…or is this part of the carnival act?” Debra snorted.
“And now the Whore of Babylon speaks,” the woman shrieked. Her voice was pitching like a revivalist preacher, and every word from her mouth was accompanied by flecks of spittle as she threw her hands up, and then threw them wide as if to embrace the world. “Heed not her words either, my children. Her words are coated in honey, but they are bitter as Wormwood once you truly taste the lies that fall from her tongue.”
“Do I have to listen to any more of this?” Debra snarled. She brought her shotgun up to her shoulder and jacked a round into the chamber.
Just then, Joel heard it. There were a series of crashes and
from the closest room he heard what sounded like a thrum. Placing his hand on Debra’s arm, he gave a slight shake of the head and put a finger to his lips indicating that she be quiet. There was a strange, muffled sound coming from the room just ahead. He advanced slowly, his eyes darting back and forth between the crazed woman, Debra, and the open doorway.
At last, he reached it and could look inside the room. Joel had to shake his head to ensure he wasn’t seeing things.
A chair had been kicked over and two bodies hung suspended in a pair of open closets. Their hands had been bound behind their backs and tied to their ankles. Just as he made eye-contact with the third person in the room, the man leaned back against the wall, put the barrel of what looked like a .30-06 rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Even with some suppression, the boom still rattled the walls of the hotel room and hurt Joel’s ears.
“Heathens!” the woman’s voice bellowed. “You think to come here and silence the word of God?”
“Nope…just you,” Joel said. He glanced at Debra and nodded.
The boom of her shotgun echoed up and down the hallway. The tall, gaunt woman stumbled back and fell hard. She was likely dead before her body landed as her heart had been pulverized and blown out her back by the close-range power of the shotgun.
It was then that Joel heard the sound of singing again. He was almost certain that it’d stopped at some point, but he wouldn’t be able to swear to it.
He continued along the hall, glancing into the other rooms as he did so. It was the same scene being repeated over and over. Two people hanging or even laid out on the bed with a plastic bag over their head and a section of electrical cord around their throats. The one part that seemed strange were the fact that many of the individuals had been restrained with either their hands tied behind their backs or something along those lines. To Joel, that screamed that not everybody had been willing to meet his or her maker.
At last, he reached the end of the hallway where it would turn right. The singing was coming from behind a door to his right opposite the rooms that had looked out onto the Signature Towers across the way.
Steeling himself for any number of possibilities, Joel motioned for everybody to gather around. Once they were in place, Joel took a deep breath and then kicked the door in. Debra moved fast, almost throwing herself into the room.
Despite his hardened exterior, Joel felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. Then the smell hit him and he doubled over. Not even Debra could hold back from being ill, and everybody was backing out of the room while trying to give themselves space between each other as everybody either bent over with hands on knees or dropped to the ground to vomit.
Eventually, Joel and the others were able to gain their feet. Through it all, the singing had not stopped. Joel staggered into the room and rubbed the tears from his eyes that had come involuntarily as he’d been sick.
On their knees against one wall were a dozen children between the ages of perhaps ten and fourteen. They were filthy and their clothing had been reduced to rags ages ago and now probably only clung to each tiny frame due to the grime. They were singing the song, Amazing Grace.
Despite their outward appearance, they sang like angels. They all had their heads cocked to the side, obviously curious as to the source of the noise in their room, yet not choosing to stop singing. A few had dark glasses on, but the others showed the typical signs of being blind.
The few that had cataract film over their eyes almost looked like the undead except for the lack of black tracers. Still, that was not the most disturbing aspect of the room. Chained together and barricaded in what had once been a luxurious bathroom were an unknown number of zombie children.
The arrival of Joel and his people had stirred up the undead children who were all straining at their bonds to try and get at the new arrivals. Beside the bathroom door was one of the living children. He had a large plastic bucket and was ladling what looked like chunks of raw meat and slinging it in to the zombie children. Some were distracted enough to stop struggling as they grabbed a piece of meat and began to tear and chew at it with gusto.
“What the hell?” Debra breathed, her arm across her face to try and mitigate the stench.
“I can’t begin to even guess,” Joel replied.
“We are trying to bring the lost children of God back from the grips of Satan,” a small voice said.
Joel turned to see a little girl of perhaps twelve get to her feet. She moved amongst the other children, touching each one on the shoulder as she did. Eventually, the singing stopped.
“Are you the angels promised to deliver us to our Heavenly Father?” the girl asked as she came to a stop directly in front of Joel. “We were told that God would send his angels to bring us home when it was time.”
He didn’t know what to say. He stared down at the little girl in confusion. He knew that he’d been correct in declaring his edict of not accepting children into the compound. The ones he’d encountered thus far had not been so up close and personal; they’d always been at a distance which allowed him to look beyond their tears, their fear, or their last shred of hope that the nightmare would be over.
“Yes,” a soft voice whispered from beside him.
Joel turned to see Debra step forward. She quickly moved behind the girl, covered her mouth with one hand and drove a blade into her temple as if she were one of the living dead. The girl’s eyes went wide for just a split second, and in that moment, Joel wondered if her sight might’ve returned because she seemed to stare directly at him.
“Let’s get this over with,” Debra hissed, motioning towards the children that had been part of the chorus.
Only a couple of the bikers stepped forward. She spun to the group, her face a mask of impenetrable ice showing no emotion at all. “If you can’t handle this, either get the hell out of the room and keep a lookout, or deal with them.” She jerked a thumb towards the zombie children.
A few heads swiveled back and forth between the living children in the room that continued to stare sightlessly and the undead version that now struggled to get to the living with none of the hesitation they often showed. Joel wondered if it was bloodlust from the recent kill…or perhaps something else.
Determined not to show any cracks in his exterior, Joel drew a knife and headed to the living and began to dispatch them in the same manner Debra had done. It did seem the quickest, and he saw no need for these poor waifs to suffer further.
At last, both groups were eliminated. “Clear the floor on the way out,” Joel called as he stepped into the corridor that still reeked of carnage with its bitter bouquet of cordite, shit, and the other smells of death and undeath.
He was just reaching the stairwell when a massive roar sounded from outside. He hurried back and rushed into the first open door just in time to see a cloud of dust billowing up to obscure the ability to see out to the street. He knew in his gut that another of the Signature Towers had suffered at least a partial collapse.
Knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see a damned thing from where he was, Joel rushed back out and hurried down the stairs. By the time he reached the second floor, he had to pull his shirt up over his mouth and nose in order to breathe. At the bottom of the stairs, his vision had been totally reduced to less than a foot or two and he stopped suddenly, his body rocking forward when somebody collided with his back.
“How the fuck are we supposed to go out into that?” Debra snarled in Joel’s ear.
“Everybody bunch in close. Grab onto the nearest person and do not let go!” Joel barked.
“Why don’t we just go back upstairs and wait for it to settle?” a voice called out from the haze starting to swirl up the stairwell on the air currents.
“A noise like that is going to bring every zombie for miles around. If we get stuck in here because nothing else happens to draw them away, we might be finished,” Joel answered.
“I was just gonna say because we ain’t a bunch of weak-ass bitches,” Debra snorted.
Joel ignored the comment and gave everybody a moment before moving through the bright rectangle that had to be the door that they’d entered through. From every direction, the moans of the undead could be heard. They needed to get moving, and all he could do was to inch forward.
The probability was very real that not only had Conrad just perished, but also Will and another handful of his people. If he kept letting their numbers be chipped away due to his own foolishness, he was liable to wake up with a dagger in his back; and he would deserve it. The entire operation had become one cluster-fuck after the next.
Twice Joel had to shove aside a zombie that just seemed to appear out of nowhere. With the fires burning and all the death (and undeath) surrounding them, it was not like he could tell if one was getting close until it was literally upon him.
They’d gone a short distance when Joel heard somebody calling his name. Stopping, he tried to focus on the distant-sounding voice. Very slowly he turned his body to try and orient on the source. He called back twice and then shut his mouth after another of the walking dead staggered out to him and lunged. Its cold, dead hands actually swiped down his face sending a shiver down his spine.
“Joel?” a voice from his left whisper-shouted “You out here, boss?”
“That’s Will,” Debra breathed, sounding almost relieved.
Joel paused and waited until he heard the call again. As soon as he did, he turned slightly and called back. “Will? Are you guys okay? Did everybody make it out? Was that your building?”
He hadn’t intended for all his questions to come out in a rush. It probably sounded desperate, but he couldn’t help but be a touch anxious.
“Most of us made it,” Will’s voice said from what sounded much closer now. “And yeah, that was our building. Somebody set off a bomb.”
“That was most likely the Children of the Redeemed,” a familiar voice said.
Joel felt his entire body vibrate with relief. Conrad Parks emerged from the haze with an arm over Will’s shoulder. It took less than a few heartbeats for Joel’s relief to turn to sadness and a hint of anger. Even with a thorough coating of dust, the dark stains shown clearly. The one that ripped his heart out from his chest was on the man’s left forearm.