Hughes slowly turned his head toward Roy. “With what?”
“With nothing,” Roy said. “The infected don’t go after each other. They only go after us. Why?”
“Because they know we’re different,” Parker said.
“So, what if they didn’t?” Roy said. “What if they thought we were them? They would if we moved and acted like them.”
Annie had considered that months ago. They all had. The infected didn’t just behave differently. They moved differently, more aggressively and spastically. Sometimes they even stood still at strange angles. Their body language would be hard to imitate, especially without any practice.
“You ever try it?” Hughes said.
Roy shook his head. “Never been trapped before.”
“There’s no way to test it,” Annie said. She didn’t like addressing Roy, didn’t even want to look at him. “If we open that door and it doesn’t work, we’re all dead.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t want to just sit here,” Roy said. He scanned the warehouse walls with his eyes when he said it, refusing to make eye contact with her either.
“Look around,” Parker said.
Annie looked around. They were surrounded by nothing but carpets, huge rolls on the floor and smaller ones stacked on a vast array of metal shelves.
“We’ve got plenty of rope,” Parker said. “We could hoist those shelves through the skylights and onto the roof and toss ‘em off. They must weigh fifty pounds apiece, if not more. We could take out lots of ‘em that way.”
There were easily a hundred shelves in that warehouse. No obvious way to hoist them onto the roof even with rope, but they could figure something out.
“Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” Kyle said.
“Can’t kill all of them that way,” Hughes said.
“We wouldn’t have to,” Annie said. “We have guns. We could thin the rest with handguns, then pick off the last ones with rifles.”
Hughes nodded. “Okay. What else you got?”
“Try to shrink the problem,” Kyle said. “We don’t need to kill or disable all of them. We just need a clear path to one of the vehicles. Just one person needs to get to the Suburban and drive off and lead them away.”
Annie sighed. They should have parked the damn thing right at the door, but no one had thought of it.
Something was happening outside. The furor grew louder, as if even more infected had gathered on the other side of the door, but they were already jammed hip to hip. The sound was building and moving . . . higher. Up the exterior wall as if they were standing on some kind of platform.
“What is that?” Kyle said and leaned forward. “It’s like they’re on stilts.”
“Are they climbing on top of each other?” Hughes said.
Annie heard a racking, sliding metallic sound.
“The ladder!” Parker said.
Oh, God. They pulled down the ladder that led to the roof. Like a fire escape, the lower part had been drawn up to keep trespassers and thieves off it when the warehouse was closed. One of the infected tripped the mechanism that dropped the bottom rungs to the ground.
“Onto the mezzanine!” Hughes shouted. “Now!”
Parker bolted for the stairs. Kyle leapt from his chair and grabbed Annie by the hand. They both followed Parker. She took the stairs two at a time as the roar outside rose toward the sky.
9
There were twelve skylights embedded in the roof of the warehouse, two rows of six running the length of the building. They weren’t the smallish kind meant for houses. These were industrial scale. You could drop a car through them.
The two skylights at the front, where the exterior ladder crested the ceiling, went dim, the sunlight partially blotted out by more than a dozen infected announcing themselves with slaps on the glass overhead.
Hughes stood on the mezzanine in the back next to his friends. He knew without even thinking about it that they had a single possible option—barricade themselves in the office. But closing and locking the door wouldn’t be good enough.
“We have to block the stairs!” he shouted and waved his hands toward the warehouse floor. “Cover the stairs with those shelves!”
He and the others ran back down to the main level. Tipping shelves over onto the stairs wouldn’t stop the infected from climbing, but it would slow them down.
All the shelves were stocked with small rolled-up carpets. Hughes and Parker cleared and hoisted one of them while Kyle, Annie, and Roy took another. There were two sets of stairs leading up to the mezzanine level, one on the left and one on the right. Hughes and Parker carried their shelf toward the staircase on the right while the others took care of the left.
Another infected made it up the ladder every couple of seconds, and they spread across the roof and blocked out the overhead light like a dark slow-breaking wave. Hughes caught Annie looking up toward the swarming mass and shuddering.
“Come on!” he shouted. They could gaze at the ceiling in horror later.
Hughes and Parker hauled three more shelves onto the stairs, laying them down at forty-five-degree angles for maximum slow-down effect, with one edge touching the steps and the other resting against the railing. The stairs were a genuine obstacle course now. Passable, no question about it, but a pain in the ass. Hughes needed almost a full minute to climb to the top.
Annie, Kyle, and Roy did the same thing to the staircase on the other side of the mezzanine, and all five of them reconvened at the door to the office.
The warehouse was much darker now, the floor in shadow, the skylights in the roof filled with jeering and menacing faces. More than a hundred infected impotently slapped their palms on the glass.
The dark waters were rising, Hughes thought. The infected were coming in, and he and his friends weren’t getting out. Hughes had long ago accepted that something like this would one day happen to him, and he knew that that day would come sooner rather than later, but knowing did not make it easier.
He wanted to scream that he and his friends were on a mission to cure them and everyone else. Let us go, he wanted to shout. We can save you. We can save everyone. But all he could do was take out as many as he could on his way out.
“Look on the bright side,” Roy said.
“What’s that?” Parker said.
“If they all go up there,” Roy said and nodded toward the roof with his head, “we’ll have a better chance if we run out the front.”
An interesting notion, Hughes thought, but only if everything went perfectly. The roof might be large enough to hold all of them. What were the chances, though, that all of them would go up there?
Miniscule. Negligible. Vanishingly close to zero.
“It can’t end like this,” Kyle said.
Sure it could, Hughes thought. Every one of them knew that saving the world was the longest of long shots. They weren’t even sure they could get to Atlanta. If they did manage to get there, odds were remote that the CDC would still be there. If it were still in business, the chances that the doctors would actually find a cure were abysmal. If those odds weren’t bad enough, Annie had damn near convinced him that there was no point, that hardly anybody was left alive anywhere anyway and that those who were—like Lucas and Roy and Joseph Steele and his henchmen in Lander—arguably weren’t even worth saving.
So, Kyle was wrong. It absolutely could end like this. And it was about to.
Hughes heard a sharp splintering crack in the ceiling above the far end of the warehouse. Then another crack, louder this time, and finally an explosive shattering of glass shards showering onto the concrete below.
Hughes felt resigned. Resigned to finally die but also to fight.
Parker flinched but otherwise watched the scene stoically. Annie seemed to steel herself. Roy’s left eye twitched.
Just like that—and everyone had to know this was coming—one of those things fell through the broken skylight, its arms and legs flailing like a bug as it descended and smacked
onto the floor. It did not move. Did not even twitch. The fall from above killed it instantly. Hughes thought he saw a small puddle of blood under its head.
Then another fell, this one screaming on its way down and twitching for just a moment after it hit.
Another skylight shattered and three infected plunged toward the floor all at once, feetfirst as if they’d jumped through the glass rather than falling or diving through it. All landed in a mangled heap at the bottom. None survived.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Parker said.
Hughes had been observing the infected’s behavior for months. They were as predictable as the seasons, so he wasn’t the least bit surprised by what happened next: all of them on the roof belted what sounded like a victory cheer, and within a matter of seconds, every remaining skylight shattered at once. Dozens plunged from the roof if they were diving down into heaven. They burst their skulls, snapped their necks, shattered their legs, and crushed their internal organs on the concrete. Some landed on the tops of the metal shelves and split their backs like twigs.
The universe is killing itself, Hughes thought.
The warehouse looked like the inside of a giant meat grinder with a steady stream of post-human bodies falling through holes and amassing themselves into twisted piles below.
“My God,” Annie said and covered her mouth. She looked like she was about to throw up. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the incredible scene before her. Nobody could.
It was the worst thing Hughes had ever seen. And yet—and yet—soon enough there would be hundreds of dead and broken bodies on the floor, far more than he and his friends could ever dispatch with their hands or their guns. And they kept coming, climbing up the ladder and hurling themselves lemming-like into the cavity below.
They fell at a slower rate now. They could only ascend the ladder one at a time. Most of them dropped through the farther skylights, the ones nearest the ladder, so the piles of bodies at the far end of the warehouse grew taller than the others.
Hughes braced for what was sure to happen eventually. It was a simple matter of physics and biology. A human being, infected or not, had a hell of a time surviving a forty-foot drop onto concrete. A forty-foot drop onto something much softer, though, was a different equation. A pile of bodies wasn’t the softest thing one could land on, but it was softer than the floor. It was softer than grass. And the drop wasn’t as steep anymore. Forty feet had been reduced, in the last couple of minutes, to just over thirty.
A plummeting infected landed feetfirst in one of the far piles, toppled to the floor a little bit awkwardly, and managed to crawl away. It seemed to have broken its leg but was otherwise fine.
“Should we bother with hand weapons?” Kyle said.
Parker shook his head. “Just shoot them. Before they get anywhere near us.”
Hughes agreed. They might have enough ammunition now and the noise wouldn’t make any difference. “Roy and I will take the staircase on the right. The three of you take the left.”
They armed themselves, Roy with Lucas’s Bushmaster, Parker with the hunting rifle, Kyle and Annie with handguns, and Hughes with his pump-action Persuader.
“You fire while I’m reloading,” Hughes said to Roy. “And I’ll take your place when you are.”
Roy nodded.
“Get ready,” Hughes said and set his weapon to fire. “Don’t waste ammunition. Wait for them to reach the stairs.”
The infected that broke its leg was crawling away, toward the far corner of the warehouse, apparently too injured and dazed to understand what was happening or where it should go. More began surviving the fall, though, some too injured to move, but first one and then another limped away.
Hughes counted seven of them on their feet and staggering around at the far end of the warehouse. “Hey!” he shouted. No sense delaying the inevitable, and besides, the last thing he wanted was twenty of them charging at the same time.
All seven turned in unison as another fell headfirst through the skylight and snapped its neck. The survivors made a beeline for Hughes, for their prey, four of them limping and three of them running.
“We just might get out of this,” Parker said.
“Don’t get cocky,” Hughes said and descended the stairs as far he could without getting tangled up in the shelving.
His Persuader held eight 70mm shells, one in the chamber and seven in the magazine. He splattered the three runners with a single shot, then racked in the next round with an intimidating ca-crunch as more of them plunged from the sky.
He watched the four infected limping toward him as if he had tunnel vision. Everything else in the world—the walls, the ceiling, even the stairs at his feet—vanished into a peripheral fog.
The infected limping toward him came at their own pace, the first moving a bit faster than walking speed, the slowest barely moving at all. Hughes wouldn’t be able to take out more than one per shot this time.
He waited until the first made it right to the bottom of the steps, then blasted it into a bloody mess. As he raised his eyes toward the next one in line, roughly fifty feet away, he saw at the top of his tunnel vision that two more were coming right toward him, and they were both running.
So he widened his view and saw four more charging at full speed toward Parker at the top of the left staircase, all running, none limping, as if the infected were dropping from a modest height onto mattresses now.
Two more hurtled down from the ceiling.
Hughes and Parker both fired until their weapons were empty. Hughes headed back up the stairs to reload in the office as Roy took his place.
“You okay?” Annie said as he reloaded the shotgun.
“Golden,” he said. He wasn’t really, but they had a chance of making it out now. It was a numbers game at this point. Would Hughes and his friends run out of ammo, or would this army of infected run out of bodies? That was the question. There was a finite number outside the warehouse. Every one killed or maimed on impact took itself off the board. Every one shot by Hughes and his companions was another removed from the board. And if Hughes and his friends ran out of ammo, they still had their hand weapons.
Now that it was Roy’s turn to cover the staircase, Hughes could zoom out and watch the broader picture unfold. What he saw was not good. More falling infected were surviving, and fewer of them were limping.
Hughes swapped places with Roy when the Bushmaster needed a reload, and Kyle and Annie took over from Parker when he emptied the hunting rifle.
Bodies piled up like bloated, oozing anthills at the base of the staircases, but the goddamned things kept on coming. With a wide blast radius from the Persuader, Hughes barely had to aim and could fire almost an autopilot. His ears rang with tinnitus, his shoulder throbbed from the shotgun’s kick, wafts of gun smoke stung his eyes, and the stench of blood, copper, shit, black powder, and propellant filled his nostrils.
He saw every infected he dropped as a victory and kept telling himself that there were only so many, but there were still more outside coming in. They just would not stop. At last he felt like a man on the beach trying to hold back a tsunami with sandbags. It just wasn’t possible, and he finally ran out of shells. Roy took his place at the top of the stairs with his Bushmaster. Hughes darted into the office to retrieve the second hunting rifle, but there were only seven cartridges left in the box.
They weren’t going to make it. He saw that now. But what else could he do? He dutifully loaded the rounds into the rifle and relieved Roy as Kyle and Annie popped their handguns at the top of the second staircase.
“I’m dry,” Roy said.
“Grab your sword,” Hughes said.
“I’m out too,” Annie said, sounding resigned.
Hughes vowed not to waste a single one of his rounds. Each infected he hit in its center of mass was one fewer he’d have to take down by hand.
Four rushed the staircase as two more fell from the ceiling.
Hughes dropped all four incoming before they reache
d the staircase. Five more of them followed.
“How many of these fuckers are there?” Parker shouted.
Too goddamned many, Hughes thought. He fired his last three shots, threw down his rifle, and slowly picked up a crowbar.
10
Annie felt a strange sense of calm wash over her knowing that she was going to die. She should have died a long time ago, back at the beginning when she got bit. Her survival thus far was a pointless glitch of nature. She was never going to save the world. She couldn’t even save herself or her friends. Roy was right. The world was better off going to sleep and not waking up.
Even so, she swung her crowbar and defended her ground on the staircase. The instinct to survive even a few more miserable moments wouldn’t release. She wasn’t even entirely sure what was happening. The world was a blur now. The infected making their way up the staircase with their snarling teeth and predatory eyes seemed almost hallucinatory. The sounds of weapons bludgeoning bone and sinew and flesh sounded as if under water, unintelligible shouts from her friends like recordings played in slow-motion. She finally reached the verge of total exhaustion and surrender when the gauzy state lifted and she returned to a state of partial alertness.
The back of the warehouse was clear. Nothing else was coming down from the roof.
Just three last infected on the stairs headed toward her and Kyle and Parker, bursting with a relentless energy that had deserted her some time ago. She felt a hand on her shoulder.
“I got this.” Parker’s voice, heavy and weary but determined somehow. He stepped forward, looking as depleted as she was, like he was about to topple over, but he saved her from expending her last drop, and she eased herself to the floor in a state of bewilderment that this was actually just about over, that she wasn’t going to die after all.
Kyle stood to the left of the staircase, Parker to the right.
The three infected ascended the stairs, bounding over the obstacles in their path as if they’d been bred for it. All headed toward Parker.
He cocked the hammer back and swung a little too early and a little too slowly. The first of the three infected on the stairs flinched and changed direction.
The Last City Page 11