War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

Katherine shrugged, pulling out the 9-iron from her belt loop. “I don’t know I thought you were a scientist and that you could just whip something up. You know, from a paperclip and a lightbulb.”

  At first, Thuy thought she was serious about the explosion and joking about using the golf club. When she realized she had it backwards, she gave an insincere laugh and took the club from the woman’s hands. “We’ll use the coat rack but not here. You’re in line with the door. If Jaimee Lynn shoots the bullet will likely strike you.”

  She moved Katherine to the side, and together they took up the coat rack and used it as a battering ram. The main stem of it was a sturdy aluminum alloy and not easily bent; the first of the four fancy, stylized jutting legs that made up the base, broke off after two swings. They were two crashing swings. In the normal course of events, they would have sounded like two odd thuds. In the nearly silent building, they were like the explosions that Katherine wanted.

  “To the left,” Katherine cried, “we’re hitting metal!” Behind them, the door was being savagely attacked—savagely, but inefficiently. Little fists pummeled it, while one small boy shook the knob with all his might. Either way, the noise was frightening and spurred the two women on. They found the space between two metal studs and opened a ragged but narrow hole.

  By then, all of the legs of the base had broken off and the coat rack was now only a pole and they still needed to bust through the wall of the room that adjoined theirs.

  It was then that Jaimee Lynn realized that the gun she carried could be used for more than just killing people. Without flinching, she stuck the barrel to the center of the doorknob and blew the thing apart. The children heaved against the door and the desk began to grind backwards.

  “Stop them!” Thuy yelled, yanking Katherine away from the coat rack. She had been doing “it” wrong anyway. Poking inch-wide holes in the next wall would take forever. Thuy shoved the tip of the pole through one of the holes, squatted under the other end and then heaved upward, driving a line through the drywall. She did the same with a hole ten inches to the right. In this way she carved out a jagged wound in the wall.

  She started in, yelling over her shoulder, “Katherine! I’m…” A gunshot made Thuy jump and banged her head on the top of the hole. When she looked back, she saw Katherine lying on her side, bleeding into the carpet.

  As if she were on ice, Thuy spun around and grabbed the woman by the collar of her vest, and started to haul her back to the hole. At first, Thuy was surprised at her own strength, then she realized that Katherine was kicking out with her feet, driving her weight back. “That little bitch shot me!” She gestured with her chin at her left bicep, which ran red.

  “Yes,” was all Thuy had time to say. The “little bitch” was gradually pushing the door back, a snarl on her brutish face. Thuy shoved Katherine through the hole, pushing her rear, legs, and then feet through before slithering through herself. Katherine was already at the door, her left arm dangling, the coat rack, now more spear than rack, in her right hand.

  “There’s a few of them out here. Big ones, I mean, and they’re close. We’re going to have to chance it.” Katherine darted through the door before Thuy was even on her feet.

  Thuy followed, keeping low, imitating the FBI agent as she either ran hunched over or half-slid, half-crawled along, ignoring her injured arm. They made it into the cubicle area when the little zombies suddenly appeared in front of them, cutting them off.

  “Get to the stairs,” Katherine commanded, shoving her away.

  They both should have been running in Thuy’s view. It made no sense to stay and fight, unless it was Katherine’s way of dying quickly, of being shot before she had a chance to be eaten alive or of turning into a zombie. Thuy turned and was about to run just as Katherine hurled the pole at Jaimee Lynn. It turned slightly in midair and only kicked off the girl’s arm harmlessly.

  Still, Katherine didn’t run, which meant that Thuy couldn’t either, not in good conscience. And yet, she couldn’t fight, not barehanded. She embraced a happy medium between offense and defense by charging at the closest cubicle wall and throwing her entire hundred and four pounds into it. Small as she was, she still had enough strength to send the cubicle wall crashing down right into the path of the charging zombies.

  The beasts tripped and went sprawling over it. Katherine stomped one in the head as it landed practically at her feet.

  “No, come on!” Thuy yelled, and raced for the stairs. She took two turns and there was the door, and there just beyond it was also the elevator open but only somewhat inviting. The ceiling lights had been smashed and in the glow of the police cruiser’s headlights, a squinting Thuy Lee could see Anna Holloway gesturing at her.

  “Doctor Lee!” Anna hissed, scooping the air with a beckoning arm. “This way!”

  Thuy had been racing around so much that she had completely forgotten about Anna. She now assumed that Katherine had set her watching the elevators, perhaps for a fast getaway. Thuy ran for the elevator, gulping air.

  As if she were playing some sort of video game, Anna repeatedly jabbed the button for the third floor. “There’s no way out! We gotta get those army guys back here with their fucking helicopter. It’s the only way…” The door started to close and Thuy stuck her hand out to stop it. Anna smacked it away. “What are you doing?”

  Just then Katherine hurried inside. The two blonde women glared into each other’s faces. “You!” Katherine started forward, her left hand bunching into a fist.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Anna said. Thuy was slow to realize that Anna was armed. In her hand was the black pistol. “These vests are good, but they aren’t perfect. I think Eng taught us both that. Damn it, Thuy. Stop staring and hit the door close button.”

  Thuy didn’t need to; the door started to close on its own. The simple procedure was almost interrupted again as one of the child zombies came rushing up, its black eyes bright with anticipation, its horrible mouth wide open. Anna shot it below the left eye, knocking it back with a spray of black blood.

  “Disgusting,” she seethed. “Remind me to take a bleach bath when we get to the third floor.”

  “There’s nothing for us there,” Thuy told her. “You know that the simplest experiments I have running will take hours and no amount of hoping will induce them to bear fruit any faster.”

  Anna slid her blue mask down so it hung around her neck. “No shit, Sherlock. You act like I didn’t do all this when I was with Dr. Milner. He wanted the cure so badly that he made us do the tests over and over. It was tedious as hell with him doing nothing but staring at my boobs all day long.”

  “Perhaps if you didn’t have them hanging out all the time he wouldn’t have stared so much. Now, I don’t mean to be contradictory without reason, Anna, but you won’t be able to hold out here for very long. Certainly not long enough for even the first test to be completed. It’s impossible.”

  The elevator came to a halt and the door slid open with a gentle electronic boop. Anna waved Katherine out first. The FBI agent cautiously edged out. Thuy started to follow, but Anna held her back. “If you don’t want me to use Miss FBI as a distraction, you’ll keep the elevator from going anywhere. I’ll be just a minute.”

  They were back in thirty seconds, out of breath, Katherine lugging a green backpack in her right hand which clinked and clanked.

  Thuy, ever curious, took the pack and peered inside. “I used up all the base components that we picked up at Walton. What is…? The Renway experiments? What the hell, Anna? You know these are variable-dependent. As soon as the temperature increases, you’ll see a corresponding increase in the growth factors…”

  Anna reached in front of Thuy and punched the button marked: 10. “I know all that, Thuy.” In truth, Dr. Milner had been a poor lead researcher and didn’t like to share any information that he didn’t have to. He had lived in fear of being one-upped by anyone, especially a gifted research assistant.

  Anna knew enough to fake it, and
she planned on doing just that. “We’re going to tell the Army that we have a cure. They’ll send a chopper to save us and then—oops, something went wrong. We’ll say they took too long to get to us or that the base molecules were destroyed because they only sent one damned agent with us. Or whatever. What matters is that we are out of here. It wasn’t right that they sent us in the way they did, so I say fuck ‘em.”

  “I say, fuck you,” Katherine snarled. “You are the reason we’re in this mess. You and Eng.”

  “You know what I don’t need right now?” Anna spat. “Is you.”

  Katherine smiled, wickedly. “Are you sure? Who do you plan on calling and how? I bet there’s a working radio out in that police cruiser. We’ll wait here for you while you run and get it. Good luck.”

  “I don’t need luck when I have this.” Anna held up a sat-phone. “I think you might have dropped this when you got that little bruise on your cheek. And look, it’s tied into the military net, and here is the number to FBI HQ, and this one here is the White House.”

  “And you think they’ll take your call?” Thuy asked. She hit the stop button and the elevator jerked to a halt. “Try it.”

  Anna made seven calls and grew increasingly frustrated with each. As well as she could manipulate people by using her looks, her voice was somewhat creaky and tense. Anger and hate seemed to be threaded into it, and it only got worse with each call until the last, when she told the person on the other end to: “Eat shit and die!”

  She then stood seething, staring down at the phone, fighting the desire to smash it. “Okay, new plan. We call Courtney. We tell her that we have a cure and that it’s time to get out of the Zone.”

  “Courtney is too…” Thuy had to hold back using the word smart. Courtney Shaw was no genius; however, she had a native wisdom that had grown rapidly during the last few days. She would see right through any lie that Anna might try to spin. “Courtney won’t believe you.”

  “She’ll believe you,” Anna replied, holding out the phone, displaying her own version of intelligence: conniving, self-serving, cunning.

  Thuy took the phone. “She’ll believe me because I’ll tell her the truth.”

  3- 10:37 p.m.

  New Rochelle, New York

  A second after the bomb detonated, the elevator had dropped like a stone, hurtling down four floors before its brakes kicked in, adding their metal shriek to the immense noise of the explosion and the great thunder of the building collapsing around them.

  Courtney Shaw added a high, terrified scream to the mix when the brakes only slowed them a little. The elevator shaft itself was imploding. They fell straight down another four stories before there were no longer actual stories left to the building. At that point there was a ringing crash as the elevator went sideways, the lights blinked out and everything went black. In the darkness there was a new scream of metal and then a scream of pain, and then there was a horrible wet, gushing sound which Courtney would later find out was one of the soldiers being bent in two as the elevator was partially crushed by fifty tons of rubble.

  That had been hours before. Her watch, a $19.99 Walmart special, had a crack running through its blank face, but there was an arm sticking out from beneath a black metal beam and on the stiffening wrist was a big clunky steel watch that proudly ticked away.

  Courtney glanced at it a moment after General Axelrod took his last gurgling breath. Forty miles from the ocean, and he died by drowning, she thought. Is that irony? She didn’t know. Irony was one of those things few people really understood, and this was a perfect example. He had died, drowning in blood; it had nothing to do with the ocean.

  There were only four of them left. Sergeant Carlton, who had disappeared through a hole in the elevator seventy-two minutes before. Colonel Taylor, who was a scabbed-over, swollen mess, but who could stand if there was room to stand. The elevator was on its side and canted down; it had been crushed like a beer can and now they barely had room to sit upright. Warrant Officer Tim Bryan was slumped over next to Axelrod. He too was brutally swollen around the face. There would be no standing for him as his left leg was limp and saggy. The bones had been turned to jelly.

  He moaned in a half-stupor as he had for the last couple of hours since Carlton and Colonel Taylor had pried a ginormous block of cement off of him. He seemed to be slowly dying and Courtney wondered if little bits of bone were floating up from his leg and were settling in his heart and lungs because his vital signs were dropping.

  Comparatively, she wasn’t doing so badly. She had huge lump on the side of her head, her left elbow was swollen to the size of a softball, and her back had random electric spasms from where the elevator door had slammed into her, but otherwise she couldn’t complain.

  She was in something of a doze when the sat-phone brrrred into life. “Shit!” she cried, jerking and feeling a sheet of pain run down her back. “Jeeze, I thought that was a snake or something.”

  “You gonna get that?” Taylor asked in a dry whisper.

  “Yeah, I guess.” She wasn’t used to people calling her and she had the sinking suspicion that it was going to be a government official on the other end, maybe even one she had impersonated. “Hello?”

  There was a pause. “Miss Shaw?”

  “Doctor Lee? Oh, thank God.” Courtney felt a foolish wave of relief wash over her. As they were miles deep into the Quarantine Zone, they hadn’t tried to call anyone for help and for some reason that included Dr. Lee. “We were hit by a bomb or something and we’re trapped in a building downtown. The Ge-General’s d-dead and s-so is m-m-m…” Unexpected tears poured from her and her breath was suddenly light and difficult to catch.

  “Calm down, Courtney,” Thuy ordered, coming across harsher than she wished. She softened her tone. “It’s going to be alright. We’ll figure out something.”

  “Can you come? I hate to take you away from the cure, but we’re really stuck. Sergeant Carlton is trying to find a way out, but he left ages ago and the building keeps making noises, you know, crashes and things like that.” She was racing through her words again and had to take a shaky breath.

  In the pause, Thuy broke the bad news to her. “I’m sorry but we’re trapped as well.” She gave a brief description of their predicament, including the end of her search for a cure.

  Just after this, there was a strange crackling coming from the phone and Anna Holloway came on. “We can still turn this around, Courtney. All we have to do is tell the Army that we have a cure. Sure, it’s a lie but look what you’ve been doing for the last five days. You haven’t told the truth once. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying that you are a strong resourceful woman and we all need that right now.”

  “I lied to help people,” Courtney growled, furiously.

  “And that’s exactly what you’d be doing now,” Anna answered, not missing a beat. “I get that you wouldn’t lie to save me, but what about Dr. Lee? Or Katherine? What about the men with you? What about yourself, Courtney? Don’t you deserve to be finally free?”

  Courtney wanted to be free more than anything. And she wasn’t the only one. She glanced over at Colonel Taylor; he dropped his eyes without saying a word; without trying to argue against Anna. He knew the truth as well as she did. They had done all they could to save the 7th Army from the President’s interference, and they had succeeded in the face of nearly impossible barriers.

  But that time was gone. There was no longer any true structure to the building and what was left of it could fold in on itself at any moment. If it didn’t spontaneously collapse, they still had to face the real, but remote possibility of being burned alive. There were fires in the remains of the building, but as Taylor explained in that uncompromising way of his, the fires would more than likely eat up the little pockets of oxygen left to them.

  “We’ll suffocate instead of roast,” he had said. “So, we have that to look forward to.”

  This all went through Courtney’s mind in a flash. “I’ll get us
out of here,” she promised Anna and then hung up before Thuy could try to talk her out of it.

  “Who are you going to try?” Taylor asked. “The Coast Guard? They’re about the only ones we haven’t tricked yet. Everyone else knows our voices by now.”

  Courtney tried without much hope. The Coast Guard’s squadrons of Jayhawks, Dolphins, HC-130s and HC-144s had been grounded the night before because they were “wasteful,” a word that had apparently undergone some sort of transition in its meaning, since the Coast Guard birds had been performing valuable services for days now.

  As their fuel had been taken by the Air Force, Courtney had to change tactics. She set about hunting out Marine air units that they hadn’t yet tricked and received an oddly cryptic reply from the first base she called: “We’ve been ordered by the White House to stand down for maintenance.” Never one to give up, Courtney tried again and again with different units, but always got the same reply.

  Worried that she was being played, she dialed the direct line to the HQ of the 3rd Infantry Division. “General Axelrod for General Cannan, please.” She had played the secretary for Axelrod a few times in this same manner, but this was the first time there was hesitation. She was given a quick: “Hold please.”

  “This is Colonel Knowles. I’m acting commander of the 3rd.” In the background was the sound of gunfire and engines, and someone yelling: “Move your asses, damn it!”

  “What happened to Cannan?” Courtney asked, fearing the worst. “Was he arrested?”

  “KIA. The Air Force couldn’t trust their pilots so they sent like a hundred Tomahawks our way. Who is this?”

  Courtney looked at the phone and came close to hanging up. She had never met Cannan but had spent hours trying to keep him and his men safe. His death struck her harder than Axelrod’s and his corpse was an inch from her left foot. “I think you know,” she eventually answered. “They’ve been coming after me, as well. Do you need anything?”

  He laughed without joy. “Reinforcements. Or maybe an armored brigade if you have one handy. Other than that, no. You’ve done enough just calling off those jets. At least we can fight now.”