“It’s intact,” I said. “The gate was opened normally. It’s not like something broke in.”
“Or broke out,” Lucy added.
I nodded.
“Maybe they closed down the operation here and moved somewhere else,” Tanya suggested. Her voice was low and tight and I realized that we were all talking in hushed tones, as if someone might be listening to our conversation.
We proceeded through the gate and into the camp, passing between the unmanned sentry towers.
“I don’t think they went anywhere,” I whispered. “They wouldn’t leave all these vehicles behind.” I nodded toward an area near the gate where an assortment of military vehicles had been parked.
Most of the vehicles were in desert colors, with a few in woodland camouflage. There were Land Rovers, Jeeps, personnel carriers, and a large six-wheeled truck that had a cage welded around its body.
“Mastiff,” Sam said. “I saw some of those in the Middle East. The cages can stop a mortar shell.”
“They wouldn’t leave equipment like that behind,” I said. “Either everyone who was here is now dead or they had to depart quickly and abandon everything.”
“Why would they do that?” Lucy asked. “It doesn’t make sense. If they had to leave quickly, the vehicles would be the fastest way to travel.”
“So that brings us back to everyone being dead,” Tanya said, looking around at the tents and huts.
“Maybe we should leave,” Sam said.
He had a point. Whether the people from Camp Apollo had run away or been killed, one thing was clear: this place was dangerous. But inside one of these huts could be a computer that would tell me where Joe and my parents were. I couldn’t just walk away when I was so close.
“We should take a look around first,” I said. “We might discover what happened here, and we might even find the Survivor Board database.”
Sam shrugged. “Sure thing, man. It shouldn’t take us more than a week to search the camp. There are more tents here than at the Glastonbury Festival.”
“The tents are probably where the civilians lived,” I said. “The wooden huts are likely to be the soldiers’ quarters and offices. We should focus on those.”
He looked at Tanya. I had noticed that in matters of importance, Sam always deferred to Tanya’s judgment.
She nodded. “Sure, why not? We can take a look in some of the huts.”
I led the way to the nearest hut, a long, low building with frosted glass windows and a single door. The others fell in behind me, obviously deciding that since this was my idea, I could go first.
I went up to the door and tried the handle. It turned in my hand and the latch clicked open. “It’s unlocked,” I said. I hesitated, wondering if I was going to push the door open and come face to face with a hut full of hybrids. Maybe they had been waiting in here quietly, willing us to open the door and release them.
Swallowing, I pushed the door and stepped back. The door swung open, slammed into the wall, and juddered. I hadn’t realized that I’d pushed it so hard. My actions were being controlled by adrenaline.
The air that came rushing out to greet me was so fetid that I felt like I had been physically pushed backward by its foul stench. I retched, leaning against the side of the hut for support.
Sam peeked through the doorway, one arm held over his nose and mouth.
He stepped away from the hut, shook his head as if to try and clear it of the memory of what he had seen in there, and said, “That’s some fucked up shit, man.”
10
Sam used the butt of his rifle to break the frosted glass windows all along the length of the hut, letting fresh air inside to replace the stagnant putrescence that had come wafting out of the open door.
After a couple of minutes, my stomach had stopped twisting into knots and we tentatively entered the hut.
It was a morgue. Stainless steel tables stood in two rows that reached from one end of the hut to the other, forming an aisle in the center. The walls were covered with diagrams and charts, put up in a seemingly haphazard manner. Some of the diagrams were crudely drawn, others more professionally. All showed various parts of the human body.
On each stainless steel table lay a corpse. Some were zombies, others hybrids, and a couple looked human. All of the corpses were in various states of dissection.
Built into a corner of the hut was a Plexiglas box that reached from floor to ceiling. There was nobody inside it at the moment but I wondered who or what it had been built to contain.
The nearest body to us was that of a zombie. Its ribcage had been opened and was held by surgical clamps, revealing the creature’s insides. Some of those insides had been removed. Its intestines lay on the table next to the body, along with its heart.
The creature’s stomach lay on a separate, smaller table, cut open by a precise incision. The stomach’s contents had either been taken away or long since dried up. The zombie’s eyes had been scooped out of its head and placed in a jar of liquid that sat next to the stomach.
“What the fuck, man?” Sam asked nobody in particular.
“They’ve been experimenting on the zombies,” Tanya said, walking along the center aisle while she inspected each corpse in turn. “I’m guessing these are people that turned while they were in the camp.”
“And what about these two?” I asked, pointing to the two men who looked fully human. “They haven’t been zombified at all. Why are they in here?”
“I have no idea.” She inspected the human corpses. “It looks like they were shot. They both have gunshot wounds to the chest.”
“Same as the hybrids,” I said, looking over the three bodies that had the telltale roadmap of dark veins that denoted a hybrid. “Were the humans bitten?”
“Yeah,” Tanya said.
“Maybe they were killed before they could turn,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a bit more disturbing than that. Take a look at this.”
I went over to the human corpses. They had been cut open and sewn shut again. Their bodies bore Y-shaped autopsy scars that ran from their shoulders to their groins. Tanya pointed at their wrists.
Each man had been bitten in exactly the same place, the right wrist, and the bite mark was at almost exactly the same angle in both cases.
“That didn’t happen naturally,” I said.
Tanya looked at me. “It’s so precise, I’d say it was part of an experiment.”
“But who would volunteer to be bitten by a zombie?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Who said they volunteered?”
I felt suddenly cold. “This place is run by the government. Do you think they sanctioned this?”
“Hell, yeah.”
I needed some air. Despite the broken windows and open door, there was still a strong stench of death in here. I went outside and gratefully breathed in the fresh air.
I could understand the government wanting to dissect the zombies to see what made them tick. The same with dead hybrids. But those two men in the hut looked like they had been subjected to bites in the name of whatever weird science was being practiced here. They had been murdered.
Tanya appeared next to me. “You still want to go exploring more huts?”
“Maybe we can find a computer,” I said. “It might tell us what happened here.”
“Even if we found a computer, those files would be buried so deep, we’d never be able to access them.”
I looked around at the city of tents and huts. “Something doesn’t make sense, Tanya. Where is everyone? If they left, why did they leave the vehicles behind? These vehicles are worth millions.. They wouldn’t just walk out of here and leave all that.”
Sam was running his hand along the flank of the six-wheeled Mastiff. The sand-colored vehicle was huge, at least ten feet high and twenty-five feet long, the tops of its wheels almost as high as Sam’s waist. “We’ve got to get the keys to one of these, man,” he said, grinning.
Lucy was standing next to the Masti
ff, hands on hips, looking up at the gun mounted on the roof.
“I don’t know where everyone is,” Tanya said. “I don’t know why they walked out of here instead of driving. But I do know that if we find a computer, it will be password-protected and encrypted. This camp is a bust. We need to get back to the boats and sail down to Camp Prometheus. Hopefully that place won’t have gone all Roanoke on our ass like this one has.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. It’s just that I want to know where Joe and my mother and father are so badly. I keep thinking I’m getting closer to finding out and then it’s snatched away from me.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “We all want to know who is on that Survivor Board, Alex. And we’ll get a chance to look at it. But not here. There’s nothing here but death.”
I nodded. Our time would be better spent at the next camp, where there might actually be people, than in this abandoned place.
Looking over toward the vehicles, I saw Sam and Lucy opening a small hut and peering inside.
“Hey, we’re leaving,” I shouted.
Sam hesitated at the doorway. He shouted, “Be there in a minute, man,” and then disappeared inside the hut.
Lucy came over to me. “He wants to drive that,” she said, pointing at the Mastiff. The vehicle keys are in that hut.”
I rolled my eyes. “We haven’t got time to go joyriding.” Now that we were going back to the boats, I wanted to get there as soon as possible. This camp gave me the creeps.
Sam reappeared with a set of keys in his hand and a grin on his face like a child on Christmas morning.
“We’re going back to the Land Rover,” I told him. “Meet us there when you’re finished playing.” I turned around, intending to return to the Land Rover, but when I saw Tanya, I froze.
She had already walked part of the way toward the open gate. But something had stopped her in her tracks. She looked like she had walked into a nest of rattlesnakes and was trying not to make any sudden movements. I followed her gaze toward the gate.
When I saw what was there, I muttered, “Oh, fuck.”
Beyond the fence, coming out of the woods, was a horde of hybrids. There were hundreds of them, all dressed in military uniforms and walking out from the tree line onto the grassy area where we had parked the Land Rover.
Some of them had already reached the vehicle and were looking inside for prey.
“Sam,” Tanya said, “how quickly can you get that thing started?”
“I’m on it, man.” He opened the rear doors of the Mastiff and then went to the driver’s door and got inside.
I remembered how many military personnel had been at this camp and I was sure there were a thousand hybrids just beyond the gate. A thousand pairs of yellow eyes gazed at us with murderous intent. Then the infected creatures came running through the gate and into the camp.
“Go!” Tanya shouted, turning on her heels and sprinting for the Mastiff.
I ran for my life.
11
As I ran for the Mastiff, I could hear the hybrids behind me. Their boots sounded like beating war drums. They were close enough that I could hear their breathing. And they were getting closer. I knew how fast the damned things ran and I wasn’t sure I could get to the vehicle before they grabbed me.
Tanya and Lucy were already at the truck. But instead of jumping inside through the thick metal rear doors, they unslung their M16s and began firing at the hybrids.
The bullets screamed through the air close to my head. I resisted the instinct to drop to the ground. Keep running. Just keep running.
When I finally reached the Mastiff, the girls scrambled inside to give me room to get through the rear hatch. I jumped inside but as I did so, I felt something tug on my boot. I landed on the metallic floor of the Mastiff with a loud ufff as all the air blasted from my lungs. Before I had a chance to recover, I was being dragged back outside by a hybrid.
She had my boot gripped tightly in her hands and she slid me across the floor to the hatch. I kicked at her face with my other boot but she didn’t even seem to notice.
Lucy screamed and grabbed my arms, trying to pull me back into the vehicle. I wasn’t sure what Tanya was doing because my attention was focused on kicking the hybrid that had me in her grip.
Then a single shot rang out in the enclosed space and a hole appeared in the hybrid woman’s forehead. She released me and fell to the ground.
“Sam, go!” Tanya screamed.
More hybrids appeared at the hatch, hands grabbing and clawing as they tried to force their way inside.
I scrambled farther into the vehicle and pulled out the Walther.
The engine roared to life and we lurched forward.
But we were going too slowly. The hybrids surged forward and one of them got inside. I kicked him hard and he staggered back before Tanya put a bullet in his head.
The Mastiff began to pick up speed but the hybrids were still matching our pace.
“We need to close the doors,” I said.
Tanya began to shoot wildly into the mass of faces that appeared at the hatch. Lucy joined her, firing her M16 in three-round bursts.
I fired the Walther until it was empty. The air inside the vehicle smelled of cordite and my ears were ringing.
At last, we seemed to be moving fast enough to outrun the hybrids. I lunged forward for the doors and pulled them closed, locking them with shaking hands.
“Hold on,” Sam said from the driver’s seat, “we’re going through the gate.”
Metal screeched against metal as we hit the gate and went through it. Then I could hear the heavy thump of hybrids bouncing off the Mastiff’s grille as Sam plowed through them.
I was breathing hard, trying to tell myself that it was all over, that we were safe for now.
“Everyone okay back there?” Sam asked as we drove onto the track that led through the trees.
“Yeah,” Tanya said. “We’re okay.”
“There’s gonna be a slight bump,” Sam said. “Hold on.” We rammed through the gate at the checkpoint. He turned to us, grinning. “This thing is pretty neat, huh?”
I sat up and looked around the interior of the Mastiff.
There were five fold-up seats attached to one side wall, and three on the other. They each had a four-point harness like those used by fighter pilots. The floor was made of bare, ridged steel, the ceiling covered in sand-colored fabric that housed the interior lights. A circular hatch in the ceiling led to what I assumed was the top-mounted gun. Below the hatch was an adjustable platform for the gunner to stand on.
An opening at the front led to the cockpit where Sam sat. There was an empty passenger seat next to him and an array of computer screens. Instead of being a single pane of glass, the windscreen was split into two side-by-side panes. Through them, I could see the trees and the track ahead. We were rumbling along at a decent speed.
Sam was right; the Mastiff was pretty cool.
“Who wants to sit up front?” he asked. He really was like a kid with a new toy.
I looked from Lucy to Tanya. I didn’t mind sitting back here and I didn’t want the earlier argument with Sam to be rekindled if we sat together on the front seats.
“You go ahead,” Tanya told me. She must have assumed that I wanted to go up there because, after all, I was the gamer geek who played at being a soldier online.
“Yeah, you go and sit with Sam,” Lucy said. “We’ll stay back here and have some girl talk.”
“Oh?” I asked. “What are you going to do, compare lipstick colors?”
“No,” she said, “we’re going to discuss the best way to kill hybrids.”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking or serious. I looked at Tanya, who looked as solemn as Lucy, giving me nothing to work with.
So I went up front and slid into the seat next to Sam.
“How awesome is this?” he asked. “We can drive this thing at night with the lights off. There are six cameras mounted outside, including night v
ision.” He leaned across and turned on a screen in front of me. The display showed the track ahead.
“SDU,” Sam said. “Situation Display Unit.”
“We won’t be driving at night,” I reminded him. “We’re going back to the boats. You’ll have to leave the Mastiff at the village.”
He looked a little disappointed. “I know that, man. I’m just saying what we could do if we had to.”
“Well, let’s hope we don’t have to,” I said. “This is great but I prefer the safety of the sea.”
He shrugged and reached down to switch the radio on. When the sound of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” came out of the speaker, I was grateful that the station wasn’t broadcasting another interview. The last thing we needed was another rant from Sam.
Instead, he sang along with Simon Le Bon. Sam’s singing voice wasn’t great but I’d take it over an argument any day.
We got to the main road and Sam turned the Mastiff in the direction of Muldoon. “Hold on,” he shouted back to the girls. “We’ve more of the creepy bastards coming this way.”
I looked through the narrow windscreen. Ahead of us, a horde of hybrids was gathered on the road. Some of them came running straight at the Mastiff while others waited.
The first few runners had nearly reached us.
Sam increased our speed. “Get ready to die, fuckers.”
But instead of letting the bulky Mastiff run them over, the hybrids leaped up onto the vehicle. I realized then that the grille that protected us also had a downside; it provided hand-holds and made it easy for the hybrids to swarm over the vehicle.
Two of them scaled the front grille and crouched in the hood, pummeling the windscreen with their hands. Their fists made a hollow thumping with each blow and left smears of blood on the glass.
“They won’t break through there,” Sam said.
I could hear more of them on the roof, pounding on the metal, trying to get in.
Sam used the Situation Display Unit to see where we were going, since the view through the windscreen was blocked by the hybrids trying to break the glass.
Wildfire- Destruction of the Dead Page 6