It was Jaimee Lynn who had been thrown; Thuy only recognized her by the yellow dress, which was already torn and hanging off her in bloody tatters. The girl charged and was easily swatted aside, giving Eng time to punch the child shredding his wrist over and over again, until its jaw broke and it let go.
He was so much stronger than the children, and Thuy was sure he would win the fight, which left her in a strange position. Whichever side won would instantly turn on her and attack her next. She would be helpless against either.
“Katherine, get down here!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, never taking her eyes from the fight. It was ending quickly. Eng managed to grab two of the children, one in each hand, and with terrific force, he dashed their heads together. What might have killed a normal child only dazed the two and he smashed them together again and again until their heads cracked open and Thuy could see their brains swimming in black juice.
Seeing that she was all alone, Jaimee Lynn hesitated. She had a gaping hole in her stomach and the side of her face was puffed up; she knew she couldn’t defeat Eng and yet, her anger was so great that she went at him one last time. With ease, he slipped her charge, grabbed her by the throat and slammed her down.
He leaned over her, his right hand crushing her larynx. “I killed your father because I didn’t need him anymore. And now I don’t need you.” Her face was a brilliant red beneath the black blood. Her eyes bulged, but they never lost the intensity of their hatred. She was an evil little creature right to the end.
“Which is my fault,” Thuy mumbled. Louder, she called out, “Eng!” He turned and as he did, she drove the broken club four inches into his right eye. Impossibly, he didn’t die. He grabbed the club with his right hand and bent it in half, tearing open his eye socket as he did. Thuy stepped back in shock, her mouth beneath the blue mask hanging open.
“Christ,” she whispered.
He laughed at her fear and began to struggle upwards, only he had forgotten about Jaimee Lynn. She was beneath him where his soft spots were exposed. Rearing up, she sunk her teeth into his throat and began viciously wrangling her head side to side. Blood gushed down her face in sickening torrents. He tried to pry her away but with her jaws clamped on him, all he managed to do was tear his own throat out. The blood surged from him until at last, he trembled, faltered and fell to his side.
Jaimee Lynn was not done with him. She began to tear out his innards, making such hideous glopping noises that Thuy had to turn away.
The door to the elevator had closed and so she banged on it, crying, “Katherine! Anna! Get down here, please.”
The machinery began whirring a second later and Thuy felt an almost magical feeling of relief. She sagged against the door and stared at Jaimee Lynn, a gloved hand up to her masked face; she had never seen anything quite so horrible. The little girl glowered at her from the remains of Eng. She had torn him open from his throat down to his belly button and, as Thuy watched, she grunted and pulled something fat and black from his chest cavity; it might have been his heart.
“I really did try to save your father,” Thuy said, in something of an apology.
A strange mixture of hate and sadness passed across Jaimee Lynn’s face. What was even more odd was seeing her considering this. It was as if she was thinking like a real person. She tossed aside the heart. “Can y’all really save me?”
The elevator was coming, announcing itself with more machine noises. In five seconds, Thuy would be free and running for the police SUV. None of that mattered. “I will do everything I can.”
The elevator door opened a second later with a blooming stench of bleach, and Anna shoved Katherine out, holding the M4 to the back of her head. “Is…is that Eng?” Anna asked, amazed.
“I kilt him,” Jaimee Lynn said. “He wus evil and bad.”
Thuy glanced at her watch and felt her stomach lurch: there were seventeen minutes left before the bombs hit. “Yes, you did well,” she replied, evenly. “By the way, she’s coming with us.”
Behind her mask, Anna looked shocked and then angry. “The hell she is!”
“I’m not asking you, Anna,” Thuy said. “I’m telling you. Now, do something useful with that gun and shoot out the window. We have seventeen minutes to get to the helicopter, and look out there!” The zombies were almost to the SUV.
“Holy shit!” Anna gasped, before hurrying to the lobby window and firing her gun four times. A portion of the glass fell in with a crash that had even more zombies heading at them. Thuy was unencumbered by armor and not sporting horrible wounds, so she was able to sprint ahead. She darted around two beasts, outran three others, and made it to the SUV, getting inside a split second before the zombies converged on her. The vehicle was instantly swarmed. One creature with an eyeball out of its socket and hanging by a red tether, banged a meaty arm on the window, while a second tried to bite the hood. Nails scritched over the paint, scraping divots, and fists pummeled the glass.
Thuy ignored everything and concentrated on the task at hand. She yanked the vehicle into drive, slammed a foot on the accelerator and shot forward, bouncing over bodies. There was only so much room between her and the building and before she really got any speed, she hit the brakes with a screech. She had given the others all of three seconds of grace to get into the car.
It might have been enough, but Anna, who was the slowest, wasn’t going to take any chances. She saw that even if they all got into the SUV in time, it would be mobbed, and was Thuy a good enough driver to get them out of there? Anna doubted it. They needed a distraction.
Jaimee Lynn went for the rear driver’s side door, while Katherine went for the front passenger. The doors opened towards them and as the FBI agent yanked it open, Anna smashed into her from behind, sending her sprawling right out in the open. The dead went for her, but Katherine was fast, faster than Anna thought possible, and even before Anna had climbed into the passenger seat, Katherine was on her feet and scrambling for the rear door.
The night was suddenly alive with sound and thrashing movement. Thuy screamed for Katherine to get in, while Anna was yelling for Thuy to drive, “While we still can!”
“No!” Thuy yelled right back over the hungry moans of dozens of zombies. One of the bigger ones slammed his way to the front and reached out, pulling Katherine partially away from the SUV. She used the room to give it a chest-caving sidekick, sending it stumbling into the others. Now, there was just enough time for her to get inside and to perhaps close the door behind her, but as she turned to jump inside, she was confronted by a black pistol aimed into her stomach.
“Don’t…”
Anna pulled the trigger. Katherine didn’t hear the gun go off and she didn’t feel the bullet part her ballistic armor at an angle and slice up into her spleen. She did feel the shock of the impact. It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer, and she reeled back, one hand still holding the door.
Thuy stared in shocked horror, even as Anna turned the gun on her. “Drive! Now, or else.”
“No…Why, why, why did you do that?” Mindlessly, Thuy tried to get out of the car to help Katherine, only the door wouldn’t open. A pair of zombies had crashed into it and were crushing it closed. More were coming behind them. So many that Katherine didn’t stand a chance. “Shit!” she cried. In a fury, she faced Anna, ready to fight her; however, just then Anna stuck the still smoking barrel to Thuy’s throat.
“Drive. Now.” Anna ordered. “Now, before it’s too late.”
It was too late for Katherine Pennock. A long, gangly zombie had managed to pull her from the SUV, while another smaller one, what had once been a teen girl with short, unbalanced and multi-colored hair, suddenly tripped her. The SUV was forgotten as the zombies fought each other for the chance to eat her.
Even Jaimee Lynn, who had been watching the entire affair with unfeeling eyes, started across to the other side of the car, only to have the door slam in her face.
The dead were all over the agent, grabbing her, biting her,
clawing at every bit of exposed flesh. And there was nothing Thuy could do, except stare. Anna shoved the gun harder into her throat, and demanded again that Thuy drive. “No. Pull the trigger if…”
Somehow, Katherine suddenly popped up out of the scrum. She tore away from the gang of undead and for a second, her and Thuy locked eyes, fear and misery flowing through the connection. It was too much for Thuy and she went for the door again, but Katherine shook her head—and then started backing away, waving her arms. Dozens and dozens of zombies charged her and she limped back to the R & K Building just ahead of them. She was drawing the undead away from the SUV. She was sacrificing herself.
“Bitch. Bitch! BITCH!” Thuy screamed into Anna’s face. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Actually, I did.” Anna was completely composed and looked at Thuy over the gun. “She would have told all sorts of lies about me. Just like you. Right? You’ll yap away with your version of the truth. Who will they believe?” She let out a long breath, as if coming to an unwanted conclusion.
“Don’t think you can scare me with the gun. You need me for your pardon. You need a working cure of some sort for your pardon.”
Behind her mask, Anna grinned. “Oh, I have a cure. Remember the glycolipids? Do you think I don’t know what those are? I’ll get my pardon…without you. Sorry, Thuy. It’s survival of the fittest. Now, get out.”
Thuy didn’t budge. It seemed death was coming for her one way or another, and she had a choice of being eaten alive, incinerated to ash, or shot in the head. “Or none of the above,” she said, a mad grin on her face. She had no chance against the stronger, younger woman by herself, but she wasn’t by herself. “Jaimee Lynn, you can eat her if you want.”
Too late, Anna realized that Jaimee Lynn was right behind her. Two small hands shot out and gripped her by the throat. The hands were fiendishly strong and the nails dug deep into her flesh as her head was pulled back. Anna turned the gun and fired blindly, blasting a hole through the back window. She tried to twist her arm high across her chest to get a better angle, and that was when Thuy lurched across the space between them, taking an iron grip on Anna’s gun hand.
Anna was torqued around at an odd angle; her left hand and arm were uselessly pinned, and her right hand was slowly being bent in towards her as Thuy exerted all her strength. “Please…no,” Anna begged.
The barrel was now even with Anna’s ear and the more severe the angle became, the harder it was for her to fight back. Thuy twisted the gun for all she was worth and when she had it pointed straight into Anna’s face, they both knew she could kill her. But Thuy didn’t. Thuy twisted the gun until it was pointed down into Anna’s vest.
Only then Thuy fired. Anna was still alive when Jaimee Lynn dragged her into the back seat. Blood was better when it was fresh; that was just science.
4-12:09 a.m.
New Rochelle, New England
After five days, Courtney Shaw finally shut her laptop. She had done all that she could. Her last call had been to Sergeant Ross. He was a general now and that seemed about right.
His so-called Army of Southern New England was running helter-skelter east toward Boston, while he was riding on the top of an M1, the very last M1 to pull out of the line. With him was Governor Clarren, a man who would probably slug Courtney in the face if he ever had the chance. She asked Ross not to mention her. Ross began to answer with a question when there was a burst of static and the line cut off.
The first nukes surrounding Boston were detonating, filling the atmosphere with electromagnetic pulses and radiation; her sat-phone was now useless. She worried briefly about Ross and his army. He said he had made it to Framingham, seven miles from the line.
Was it far enough away? She didn’t know and frankly, she was too emotionally done in to care. She could barely find the strength to care about saving her own life. With a sigh, she crawled down into the crevice which led off into a dark little tunnel. On any other day she would’ve laughed at the idea of crawling through a passage that was only fit for a rat, but just then she didn’t blink. Using the meager LED light from the sat-phone, she scrambled through nooks and crannies, and over broken walls and heaved-up chunks of cement.
At one point she found the tunnel was forked. More on impulse than anything else, she chose the right passage and crawled for only twenty feet or so before she caught sight of a pair of boots sticking out of the rubble ahead of her. Judging by their size, she guessed they belonged to Colonel Taylor. Squeamishly, she gave them a shake; they didn’t move.
Backtracking, she took the left-hand tunnel and saw where it had been carved out in places. Either Carlton or Bryan must have been through there and she was able to scurry faster. Above her, the building shook and rumbled, sending dirt and dust sifting down. At one point the walls groaned around her, and she was sure she was one sneeze away from being crushed like Taylor had been.
Knowing her luck, Courtney figured she wouldn’t die right away. She would only be trapped and have to discover the wonders of being eaten alive by rats and cockroaches.
Even that morbid thought couldn’t scare her more than she already was. The countdown clock running in her head prodded her a little and she hurried through the underground maze until she finally came out into a strange twilight world. A few feet away, Bryan was sitting on a pile of debris. He had slit open his ballistic vest and was unhurriedly making a splint from the plates.
“One’s gone off already,” he said, pointing southwest. Twenty-three miles away, Newark, New Jersey was the site of the latest man-made inferno. Three-hundred kilotons made a light bright enough to read by. Bryan seemed unfazed by the explosion. “Where’s Taylor?” he asked, grunting through the pain of wrapping his broken leg.
“Dead. Have you seen Carlton?” He shook his head. They both looked back at the tunnel. Carlton was either dead or lost under the building. A glance at her watch showed Courtney that there was no time to go back. “We have approximately twelve minutes left to get out of here. Is that enough time to get off the ground?”
He chuckled. “I can get us in the air in about one minute, if I had a bird to fly.” He waved his arms around. “But there isn’t one here, so it’s sort of a moot point, don’t you think?”
“Dr. Lee will make it. I’m sure of it. Wait, do you have a flare or something? Don’t you guys carry those sorts of gadgets?” He dug out something that looked like an electric razor. It was an MS-2000 strobe and when he flicked it on, he nearly blinded her. Blinking back the blob of light floating in her vision, she grabbed the strobe from him and quickly mounted the pile of debris that had once been a building but was now a cairn, memorializing the dead trapped inside it.
Midway up, she turned on the strobe and instantly heard a long moan. There were zombies nearby and for the first time, she felt nothing. Not even a smidgen of fear. “There’s nothing like a nuclear bomb to make a person prioritize their life,” she muttered. She held the strobe up high as the minutes ticked away. Another nuke went off over Hackensack, New Jersey.
It was spectacular. It was horrifying.
She was still staring in sick wonder when a rattletrap SUV pulled up to the remains of the building. It gave a cheerful: beep, beep. Slightly less cheerful was the bloody body that spilled like limp, red noodles from the rear passenger side door as it opened. Seeing it didn’t slow Courtney in the least, and she leapt from slab to slab, risking a broken neck without a thought.
Thuy stepped out of the driver’s side. Calmly spraying herself with the bleach she had taken from Anna’s pack, she advised that Courtney should hurry if she didn’t want to be “flash-fried.” She also added: “It’s nasty back there, so wear masks and gloves, and spray yourselves down as we go.”
Courtney glanced in the back seat of the SUV—it looked like a hog had been butchered in the third row where Jaimee Lynn sat, looking like a living terror. In fact she really wasn’t a danger at the moment. She was torpid and slow-witted from gorging herself. Still, Courtney s
at sideways in her seat and kept a close eye on her as she sprayed copious amounts of bleach all over herself and the car.
“Seven minutes,” Bryan said, hopping on one foot to the car. He gave it a long look before getting in. He gave Jaimee Lynn an even longer one, as he settled in, but he didn’t say a word. There was no time for arguing and barely enough time to spray himself down with the bleach bottle.
“Can you fly with your leg like that?” Thuy asked, eyeing him doubtfully. “If not, I can take instructions from you.”
He laughed this off. “Stick to the science, Doc. I’ll fly. The pedals only point the nose along the horizontal axis, and I should be able…there’s the golf course! Ahhhh, crap!” Thuy bounced them right up the curb, through a waist-high fence and went rumbling down a fairway without even considering the brake.
“Where is it?” she cried, meaning the helicopter. Even with her high beams on and the light from the nukes turning the night into a psychedelic twilight, there was no sign of the Blackhawk.
Gritting his teeth from the pain as his leg was bounced around, Bryan yelled out, “Keep going! It was a par-5.”
Thuy understood to keep going; the par-5 aspect was lost on her. During a long stretch, she checked her watch: four minutes left. She jammed her foot down as hard as it would go.
“There!” Courtney screeched. “To the right.” Thuy saw the helicopter as well and she aimed for its side, pulling up within feet of it so that Bryan could hop over without wasting a moment. He had his door open before the SUV has even stopped. Just as he put his good foot down on the soft grass, the world lurched beneath them.
Bryan managed to hold on, but Thuy was thrown to the ground and Courtney fell out of the backseat.
“Was that it?” Courtney cried, staring around. She had to yell to be heard because the air was suddenly filled with a great roaring noise that almost, but not quite drowned out the blare of car alarms, the crashing of a million windows being blown out, roofs caving in and the huge snapping sounds as forests of trees toppled.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 41