On the next landing three bodies lay in a pile. As well, on the next flight of steps, at least a dozen bodies littered the treads. Lifeless arms and legs dangled through the metal balusters that skirted the steps. Many of the corpses were missing some of their limbs. Blood was congealing on the treads and risers. More blood dripped down risers into the stairwell below. The clothing of the victims hung in blood-soaked tatters from mauled bodies.
It looked to Halverson like some of the faces had clumps of flesh missing from them as though gobs of flesh had been gouged out in some dreadful manner.
His face set with grim determination, Rogers picked his way upstairs through the mounds of corpses. He looked fit to be tied.
Halverson knew the feeling. Halverson, too, could not wait to get his hands on the perpetrators of this carnage. He sprang after Rogers.
Though winded, the passengers managed to climb up the remaining seven flights of steps.
Breathing heavily, Rogers paused at the door to the top floor. Halverson was right behind him. Halverson could see Rogers wanted to make sure he wasn’t gasping for breath when he debouched into the air traffic control room. It also gave Rogers a chance to wait for reinforcements to arrive.
Halverson used the time to catch his breath as well. His heart was pounding like a trip-hammer in his chest from the long climb up the stairs. And he was in shape, he knew. He could only imagine what an ordeal the climb had been for the rest of the passengers.
Rogers held his forefinger to his lips, motioning for Halverson to be quiet.
Halverson nodded. He knew it was best not to alert whoever was waiting for them beyond the door.
Ray, Tom, and another man approached them. All of them were panting, Halverson could see.
Rogers held his forefinger to his lips again, signaling for quiet all around.
He waited for the men to catch their breaths.
Halverson double-checked his weapon to make sure the safety was off and his first bullet was chambered. The other men followed his example.
Rogers held up five fingers so the rest of the men could see. Then he held up one finger at a time. After he held up his pinky he pointed his forefinger at the door.
Halverson and the rest of the men understood. At the count of five they would barge through the door, guns at the ready.
Rogers held up his fist. He ticked off one finger at a time then pointed at the door.
He wrenched open the fire door and stormed into the large circular room housing the air traffic control equipment. On Rogers’s heels, Halverson and the rest of the men piled in.
A noseless redheaded woman in a royal purple dress staggered toward them, her mouth gaping, her eyes set in a thousand-yard stare. Fresh blood dripped from the corners of her sere mouth.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” yelled Rogers.
The woman paid no attention to him. She kept on coming, lurching toward Rogers. She reached out to grab him.
Rogers aimed for upper body mass. He shot her in the chest with his automatic. The woman stopped for a second then kept coming. Puzzled, Rogers shot her three more times in the heart. He didn’t think he could miss at point-blank range.
The woman stumbled, but continued forward.
Halverson stepped to the side of Rogers and fired a burst from his MP7 directly at the woman’s head.
The shots stopped her dead in her tracks. She toppled to the floor in a motionless heap.
Everywhere Halverson looked in the control room, blood-drenched scenes of carnage and mayhem confronted his eyes. Ripped and gutted bodies lay on desks, on chairs, and on the blood-splattered linoleum floor. Even computer screens and keyboards had mutilated bodies draped over them.
A middle-aged man shambled up to another man, bit into his throat, and tore out his aorta. A geyser of blood jetted to the ceiling.
Halverson fired a burst into the attacking man’s back. The man kept chewing on his victim’s throat. To avoid hitting the man’s victim, Halverson stepped up to the assailant, and unleashed two single rounds into the back of his head. Part of his frontal bone blew out of his face, along with one eye, brain matter, and gore. He crumpled to the ground.
Tom pelted into the room from the stairwell, his MP7 at the ready. He froze at the shambles before him. Nonplussed, he stood motionless, mouth agape, eyes bugging out of his head.
A fat man wearing a torn olive drab tank top over his hairy chest and flabby belly shambled toward Tom. Tom watched him in horror. The man’s broad round face sported three day’s growth of stubble with rivulets of blood streaming through it. The man groped toward Tom.
Tom didn’t move, unable to react.
“Shoot him!” yelled Halverson.
“I’ve never shot a man before,” said Tom.
“He’s not a man anymore.”
“What?”
“Look at him. He’s got the plague. He’s already dead. Don’t let him near you!”
As Tank Top groped toward Tom, Tom shook himself out of his funk. He swung his MP7 toward Tank Top and blasted him in the chest. Tank Top stumbled backwards then kept coming. Tom fired another burst into Tank Top’s chest with the same results as before. Terrified, Tom didn’t know what to do.
“The bullets don’t affect him!” he yelled at Halverson, who was busy shooting a man in a black suit.
The suit was ripped in half lengthwise, one half of which was swagging down his torso.
“Shoot him in the head!” hollered Halverson.
Tank Top launched his hand toward Tom’s shoulder. Tom jabbed his MP7’s muzzle into Tank Top’s chest and shoved him backwards a step. Tom shouldered the MP7 and trained it on Tank Top’s grimacing, working face. The rounds from Tom’s submachine gun entered Tank Top’s face and blew the occipital bone out the back of Tank Top’s head.
Tank Top pivoted on his heel then fell heavily on his back onto the floor. Tank Top stopped moving.
Mildred strutted into the room, her shotgun raised. She blew away a scowling, grimacing bottle blonde who was streeling toward her with outstretched clawing hands. The blonde’s jowls were streaked with blood. The force of the shotgun blast to her stomach forced her backwards several steps. Her intestines started to tumble out of the gaping wound in her stomach.
The blonde frowned and grimaced at Mildred then commenced shuffling toward her. Mildred didn’t stand around for an invitation to shoot again. She fired another blast into the blonde’s contorted, sneering face. The blast all but tore the blonde’s head off her body. A sheer strip of neck was the only thing that remained attached to the pulverized head securing it to her body. She collapsed onto a desk beside her.
“There must be hundreds of them in here,” said Halverson.
Throngs of the walking dead stumbled around the middle of the room. As soon as their staring white eyes lit on living human beings, the creatures limped and shuffled toward them, craving fresh meat, arms outstretched.
“Too many for us to handle,” said Rogers. He fired his pistol at one of the ghouls. “We need to get out of here and regroup.”
Halverson ejected a spent clip from his MP7. He snagged a fresh magazine from his bandolier and reloaded. He fired a burst into a scrofulous teenager that lunged toward him with jerky movements of his limbs.
Firing his weapon at the enemies, Rogers backed toward the stairwell door. “Everyone, pull back!” he called to the passengers in the room. “Let’s go back down the stairs!”
Except it wasn’t going to be that easy, Halverson found out.
Retreating with Tom and Mildred, Halverson heard blood-curdling screams emanating from the stairwell directly along their escape route.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rogers, Halverson, and the other five members of their group that had entered the room now crowded into the stairwell. The last man out of the room, before he closed the fire door, Halverson unleashed several bursts from his MP7 at the plague victims who were massing to assault the stairwell entrance.
When Halverson stepped
onto the stairwell’s landing he saw the source of the screams. The dead bodies that had lain heaped in the stairwell when Halverson and his group had stormed the control room were now coming alive. The creatures were laying into the rest of the passengers who were bringing up the rear. The creatures on the lower stairs were picking off these passengers from behind. Not suspecting an attack from the rear, the passengers in the back, though armed, were sitting ducks.
Meanwhile, creatures were coming back to life on the steps above the stragglers as well. These creatures attacked the stragglers from above.
The ghouls were now busy gnawing on the arms, legs, backs, necks, whatever they could sink their diseased yellow teeth into that consisted of living flesh.
It was turning into a massacre and a rout for Halverson and his gang, Halverson realized.
“We’re fucked,” said Ray, leering at the carnage unfolding below.
“It’s impossible,” said Tom, eyes locked on the imbroglio under way on the steps. “We’ll never get out of here now.”
“Time for a Hail Mary.”
More screams rent the air, echoing through the stairwell from the landings below.
“What do we do?” Ray asked Rogers.
Rogers fired at one of the gangly ghouls picking its way awkwardly through the deceased passengers slumped on the stairway. Rogers’s gun clicked on empty.
“I need more ammo,” he said.
Halverson looked at Rogers. Halverson pulled his Sig Sauer P226 out of his waistband and was about to hand the pistol to Rogers but had second thoughts. He walked over to Tom.
“I’ll trade you this for the MP7,” said Halverson.
“Why?” asked Tom.
“Burt’s a better shot than you.”
“All the more reason why I should keep the submachine gun. It’s easier to hit someone with this.” Tom waved the MP7 in his hand.
“Burt’s leading the way, Tom. We need as much firepower up front as we can get.” Halverson handed the Sig Sauer to Tom.
Grudgingly, Tom traded weapons.
“Is this loaded?” he asked. He squinted at the Sig Sauer automatic.
“One’s in the pipe. And I already released the safety for you.”
Halverson handed Tom’s MP7 to Rogers.
“This doesn’t solve anything,” said Tom, displaying his automatic like it was useless. “We’re still caught between a rock and a hard place.”
The ghoul making its way up the stairs was a fat blonde with pale blue eyes. Her steel-rimmed spectacles were broken and hung askew on her nose. She had wizened lips that curled up to reveal her gnashing, bloodstained teeth. Tendrils of blood, not her own, figured Halverson, ran down her throat. She had on a disheveled powder blue dress that hung out of true on her portly body courtesy of assorted rips and missing buttons from the bodice.
Her arms flailed at her sides as she struggled to trudge over a corpse on the next tread in her path upward. Groaning with frustration, she was encountering difficulty trying to walk onto the body, which slid down to the tread below it as she stepped on the corpse’s back.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rogers told the woman.
Clutching the MP7 he let loose a burst into the woman’s plague-devastated head. The woman dropped and slid down the stairs on her roly-poly stomach.
“Fine,” said Tom. “While we stand here picking off those things coming up the steps, the ones coming from the room behind us will eat us for lunch.”
“I don’t plan on standing here,” said Rogers. “If you want to stand here, that’s up to you.”
Tom shook his head in bafflement, at a loss to come to grips with the impasse. He heaved a sigh.
“How many of us are left?” Rogers asked the passengers around him.
He counted them.
“Where’s the rest of our group?” asked Ray.
“They’re either downstairs waiting for us, which I doubt, or they’re downstairs dead,” said Halverson.
“You really know how to turn a phrase.”
“If you don’t want to know, you shouldn’t’ve asked.”
Halverson counted the remaining survivors: Rogers, Ray, Tom, Mildred, Foster, Rosie, and himself. Seven, all told. Not exactly an army, Halverson decided. That left fourteen or so unaccounted for.
He slewed around at the sound of the fire door to the stairwell creaking open behind them. The zombies from the control room were plowing their way through, the metal door yielding to their mass.
“Let’s beat it!” cried Rogers. He lunged down the stairs. “Blast any ghoul that moves!”
“My pleasure,” said Mildred.
“This is impossible,” said Tom. He pounded his fist down through the air. “We have no chance of getting out of here in one piece!”
“So what else is new?” said Halverson.
The problem was none of them could run down the staircase on account of the corpses that littered the steps. Some of the corpses were remaining dead on the stairs, but others were reanimating and writhing back to “life” to search for food.
Halverson blew away a black man in a grimy tan suit whose deceased body was lying on its back athwart three treads and commencing to squirm as it showed signs of reanimating. As rounds from Halverson’s MP7 hit it, the creature’s skull cracked. The parietal bone along with grey brain matter blew out of the skull across the tread underneath the head, smearing the tread and the riser under it with a stewlike mixture.
“Watch your step!” called Rogers over his shoulder. “I don’t want any of you to trip and break your neck.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when Rogers twigged a corpse in his path. A sixtysomething man with sparse grey hair and a haggard face was kneeling on a tread in the process of getting to his feet. Rogers was about to kick the man in the face when the man screamed.
“Don’t!” the man cried. “I’m with you. One of those things bit me.” The man held up his bloody hands to protect himself.
Rogers reined back his kick in midair. “Where’s your gun?” he asked suspiciously.
“I’m Albert. Don’t you recognize me?”
“No. I can’t remember everybody’s face.”
“Those things can’t talk,” said Tom from the landing above and behind Rogers. “He must be OK.”
Halverson wasn’t so sure. From what he had heard of the plague’s symptoms at Langley, when one of the infected creatures bit someone that person would contract the plague. If that was true, it was only a matter of time before Albert joined the living dead.
Halverson didn’t know what to do. He could not bring himself to kill a living man for no reason. As of right now Albert was alive. The problem was that he would not be alive much longer, Halverson knew. Halverson decided he would cross that bridge when he got to it. In the meantime, he would have to keep his eyes on Albert. The moment Albert turned, he would have to be destroyed.
Halverson decided not to tell anyone else about Albert’s predicament. To tell the truth, Halverson wasn’t a hundred percent certain Albert would turn into a ghoul just because he was bitten by one. Halverson had read eyes-only reports at Langley to that effect, but that was all he had to go on.
“Follow us,” Rogers told Albert.
With a start Halverson caught sight of a ghoul falling down through the stairwell from above. The plague-infested woman was a rotund, swarthy Hispanic woman in her late twenties clad in a loud red glossy blouse. She wore her wavy brown hair some four inches long. Scowling, her mouth downturned, she took a swipe at Halverson with her right hand as she fell. Reflexively, he pulled away from her, though she didn’t even come close to hitting him.
He looked up at the topmost landing. The living dead from the air traffic control room were falling all over themselves over the metal balustrade in their eagerness to catch and devour Halverson and his group.
“Those bums can’t wait to munch on us,” said Tom, following Halverson’s gaze.
Halverson heard a sickening thud and peered dow
n through the center of the stairwell at the fallen fat Hispanic female body splayed on the first floor. Halverson wondered if the creature was well and truly dead this time or was its reanimated brain still functioning? The creature, Halverson saw, wasn’t moving. Maybe, he hoped, its brain had been smashed in the fall.
Lost in his thoughts, Halverson almost didn’t notice another zombie plummeting down the center of the stairwell. This zombie took the shape of a thirtyish slender black man with a narrow face and close-cropped hair. It was wearing a bus driver’s light blue uniform with one sleeve torn off at the shoulder. The creature wore a navy blue tie that dangled loose around its neck. The creature’s dark thick lips curled back from its teeth while, falling and looking at Halverson, it chomped on the air.
“This is sickening,” said Tom, watching the creature descend, its arms and legs flailing in futility in the air.
The bus driver zombie landed on top of the Hispanic female zombie that had preceded it in its tumble downward. Apparently, decided Halverson, the first zombie’s bloated stomach had acted as a cushion and broken the fall of the second zombie, for the latter was still writhing after it landed.
Halverson reached over the railing of the balustrade and trained his MP7 on the squirming bus driver ghoul. Halverson fired a burst. It stitched the creature’s back with bloody holes, but the creature kept undulating. With its sleeveless arm, it tried to lever itself off the zombie’s fleshy mound of stomach beneath it. Halverson aimed higher up its body, its head in his crosshairs. Halverson unleashed another burst, which split the skull of the thing. The thing stopped moving.
Rogers continued leading the way down the staircase, blowing away the living dead in his path and kicking their corpses out of his way.
Mildred fired her twelve gauge Mossberg shotgun at a teenage female ghoul that was in the act of launching itself off a tread in its pursuit of her from behind. The roaring blast resonated through the stairwell. Mildred missed.
A headset over its ears, the teenage ghoul from above dove down the stairway, hurtling corpses on the steps. The ghoul flew through the air headfirst at Mildred.
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