I was wondering if I was ever going to see Lucy again. If this mission went badly, and I died at Site Alpha Two, she would turn into a hybrid, and be killed. I would have failed her.
Never in my life had I been so responsible for someone. Before everything had turned to shit, I had forced myself to go to my dead-end job during the week and spent the weekends zoning out on video games. The most responsibility I’d had was to my teammates during online-gaming sessions. At that time, Lucy Hoffmeister had been nothing more than a faraway dream, a fantasy.
Now, I held her life in my hands. The old Alex would have balked at such a thing, preferring to lose himself in a world that wasn’t real. Now, the real world had hit me square in the face, and it had changed me forever.
The Chinook lifted straight up into the air, making my stomach lurch. Then we flew over the sea toward the mainland, leaving Apocalypse Island behind.
Chapter Eight
We descended after a silent, thirty-minute flight. It was noisy inside the belly of the Chinook, but nobody even tried to make conversation over the constant hum of the engines. Tanya sat studying her maps while the rest of us simply sat staring at the walls.
When we touched down, the rear of the helicopter opened, revealing a grassy field beneath the stars. The night was clear and dry, the moon bright and almost full, splashing the field with silver moonlight. It was a good night for zombies.
“Come on, people,” Hart said, “let’s move.” He made sweeping motions with his hands, ushering us off the chopper and out into the night. As I was about to step onto the ramp, he grabbed my shoulder and looked into my eyes earnestly. “See you in a couple of days, Alex. Don’t let Kate and Lucy down.”
“I won’t,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.
He nodded, and then disappeared back into the helicopter. I walked down the ramp and into the long grass.
“We need to leave this area now,” Tanya said, adjusting her backpack before marching away across the field toward a low stone wall.
We all followed, advancing across the field toward the wall as the Chinook lifted into the air, its rotors flattening the long grass behind us. Hart had been right about the noise; if there were zombies in the area, they were sure to hear the chopper and come this way.
We seemed to be in a farmer’s field. The farmhouse sat in darkness a couple of miles away, and the night breeze smelled of cows. I couldn’t see any in this field or the next, but we passed an open gate in the wall, so the cattle might have wandered off, leaving only their smell behind.
Tanya stopped and took out a map from her pocket. “The compound is a few miles beyond the farm,” she said, pointing at a low, dark hill in the distance. “Over there.” She turned to look at us all. “Do we go tonight, or wait until morning?”
“Let’s do it, man,” Sam said. “The sooner we finish this bullshit task, the better.”
“I’m with Sam,” Johnny said. “We should get this over with.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.” I pointed at the farmhouse. “Maybe we should hole up in there for the night and go to the facility in the morning. It’s already late, and we’ll be getting tired soon. I’d rather spend the night in that farmhouse than in the labs.”
“I’m not tired at all,” Sam said. “I’m ready to kick ass. For some reason, I feel a sense of urgency. Oh, wait, maybe it’s because I have the fucking zombie virus in my blood.” He looked at me sharply.
“I didn’t make you go to Apocalypse Island,” I reminded him. “In fact, I said I’d go alone.”
“If it wasn’t for your stupid girlfriend getting herself bitten, we wouldn’t be here at all,” he said.
The emotions that had been simmering inside me all day boiled over, and I lashed out at Sam. My punch, which I had been aiming at his face, connected with his shoulder. He was fast, and even as I was withdrawing my fist for a second blow, he drove his own fist into my stomach, forcing the air out of my lungs in an explosive whoosh. I fell down and lay in the grass, clutching my belly and trying to breathe.
Sam stood over me. “If anybody gets killed on this mission, I’m blaming you, Alex. Their blood will be on your hands.”
“Stop it,” Tanya said, pulling him away. “You two can fight it out when we get back with the H1 stuff, and we’ve all been given the antivirus. Until then, we need to work together or none of us will be going back alive.”
Sam glared at her but seemed to take her words on board. He backed away and sat on the stone wall, sulking.
I managed to suck in some breaths and stagger to my feet. I stood with my hands on my hips, looking up at the stars while I breathed slowly and tried to ignore the pain in my stomach.
Jax put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay, Alex?”
I nodded.
Johnny pointed into the dark, at the place the helicopter had landed. “We should get moving.”
I turned to see at least a dozen zombies shambling toward us. They were the slow-moving kind, trudging through the grass with hungry determination.
Tanya set off toward the farmhouse. “Come on.”
Jax and I followed while Sam and Johnny sauntered behind us, muttering to each other.
“Are we going to the farmhouse?” I asked Tanya. She seemed to have assumed leadership of our group. We all knew how tough she was, and I couldn’t think of a better person to take charge.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We need to get to that chemical as quickly as possible, while we’re still working together. If the group splits apart because of arguments, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to complete this mission.”
Her talk of the group splitting apart sounded like an overreaction to me. Sure, everyone was mad at me because they all thought it was my fault we were here, but I didn’t think the group would split because of it. Or were everyone’s emotions running hotter than I knew? Maybe the others had been talking about me behind my back.
I was beginning to feel like an outsider again, and I didn’t like it. We had all been through a lot together, so why couldn’t’ we be friends? Maybe I was too naive; in the old world, the world before the living dead had appeared, people like Sam and Tanya would never be friends with someone like me. We were too different.
But I had assumed that in this new world, that could change because we all had something in common: we were survivors.
A shot cracked the air behind us. I whirled around to see Sam standing in a firing position with the MP5 braced against his shoulder. One of the zombies that had been following us collapsed to the ground.
“Head shot” Sam said proudly. “Right between the eyes.”
“You idiot,” I said. “You’re going to bring every nasty in the area down on us.”
“Shut up, man.”
“Alex is right,” Tanya said to Sam. “The more noise we make, the more trouble we’re going to find ourselves in.”
He shrugged, lowering the weapon.
I heard a sound like a bee buzzing past my face before a bullet slammed into the wall. The sound of a gunshot reached us seconds later
“Get down,” I shouted.
A second bullet hit the wall, cracking into the rocks. I waited to hear the shot so I could gauge where it was coming from.
“It’s coming from the house,” Jax said when the sound reached us.
Muzzle flash appeared in an upstairs window. A bullet thudded into the ground somewhere near Tanya’s face. We scrambled over the stone wall quickly. As I landed on the opposite side, I glanced over my shoulder. Some of the zombies, seeing us go over the wall, had shambled through the open gate so they were on the same side as us.
“Zombies heading this way,” Johnny said.
We began to crawl beside the wall, away from the zombies. No more shots came from the farmhouse; whoever was in there shooting at us, was smart enough not to waste bullets when they couldn’t see us.
A short distance ahead, a second wall bisected the wall we were following
at a ninety-degree angle. If we tried to go over it, we would expose ourselves to the mystery shooter. If we stopped, the zombies would reach us.
We scrambled up against the second wall, putting our backs against it so that we faced the advancing horde.
Tanya readied her MP5. Sam began shooting. When Tanya was locked and loaded, she joined him in spraying bullets at the zombies. They went down easily enough when they were hit in the head, but I couldn’t help wondering how many more were going to arrive when they heard all the noise the guns were making. Sam and Tanya were probably making a bad situation worse by tearing up the night with bullets.
After a brief burst of muzzle flash and ear cracking bangs from the assault rifles, the zombies on this side of the wall lay unmoving in the grass.
“What now?” Jax asked no one in particular.
We were pinned here. If we left the safety of the wall, we would become targets for the shooter in the farmhouse.
My peripheral vision caught a movement in the darkness. I turned to glance into the field we were sitting in, and my heart began hammering.
Three figures were running toward us. In the starlight, I could just make out the camouflage pattern of their army uniforms.
“We need to move,” I said. “Hybrids.”
Chapter Nine
Sam and Tanya turned their weapons on the hybrids, but as soon as they began firing, the hybrids dropped to the ground and came scuttling through the grass on all fours like spiders, presenting smaller targets. And they were crawling fast.
“We have to go over the wall,” I said. “The only safe place around here is that house.”
“There’s a guy in there trying to kill us,” Tanya reminded me.
“I’d rather face a human being with a gun than deal with…that,” I said, nodding at the approaching hybrids.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s go. We’re making a run for the farmhouse. Sam, lay down some cover fire.”
Sam leaned over the wall and fired a few rounds at the upstairs window of the house. “Go!” he shouted.
We scrambled over the wall, and sprinted for the farmhouse. As we ran, Tanya brought up her rifle and let off a few shots toward the window we had been targeted from. I heard glass shatter, and a startled cry, and wondered if the shooter in the house had been hit by glass shards, if not by Tanya’s bullet.
Sam caught up with us, breathing hard.
The farmhouse was built of stone, with double-glazed windows and a front door that looked like it was made of heavy wood. It wasn’t going to be easy to get inside. We ran around the back, and as we reached the corner of the house, I risked a glance over my shoulder.
The three hybrids were back on their feet, sprinting toward us.
“We don’t have much time,” I said to Tanya. My words were rushed as I gasped for air. I wasn’t built for running, but at least I had reached the farmhouse without stopping. There was once a time when I wouldn’t have been able to make that run. I’d be lying in the grass back there while the hybrids tore into me and ripped me apart.
The back door looked less heavy duty than the front, but it still looked sturdy enough to withstand being forced open.
“Fuck,” Sam said. “We can’t go through there.” He turned to face the advancing hybrids, the assault rifle raised so he could look along the sights.
Tanya aimed her rifle at the kitchen window and blew it to pieces, glass crashing everywhere. “Be careful,” she said as she climbed through. Jax followed and then I climbed in, wary of the deadly looking pieces of glass lying on the kitchen counter on the other side of the window.
Johnny and Sam followed quickly.
“They’ll follow us in here,” I said.
“That won’t matter,” Tanya said. She and Sam pointed their guns at the space where the window had once been. “They’ll have to come through that gap, and when they do, we’ll blast them.”
The first hybrid appeared, his yellow eyes filled with determination and hate. Both MP5s spat bullets, and the hybrid’s head jerked back, crimson blood gushing from its face.
The second hybrid appeared, clambering past the window frame, driven by a sense of rage far stronger than any sense of self-preservation. After the MP5s spoke a second time, the hybrid’s lifeless body slid heavily from the counter onto the kitchen floor and lay dead at our feet.
I wondered how strong the bloodlust must be in these monsters that it drove them to attack without any regard for their own lives.
A flurry of gunfire dispatched the third hybrid before it even managed to get through the broken window.
“Sam, find the stairs and cover them,” Tanya said. “There’s someone up there who wants us dead. The rest of you, help me move that table to cover the opening.”
We wrestled with a heavy wooden table that had been sitting in one corner of the kitchen and positioned it over the hole where the window had once been. By sliding the refrigerator across the floor and pushing it up against the table’s legs, we managed to press the table firmly in place, covering the gap.
There were still plenty of zombies out there, but we knew they didn’t have the basic intelligence of the hybrids; zombies would walk past that table-covered opening and not even think about trying to break in.
“Any trouble, Sam?” Tanya shouted out.
“Nothing,” he replied from somewhere in the house. “Whoever was shooting at us is holed up somewhere upstairs.”
We left the kitchen and walked along a hallway to where Sam was crouched at the foot of a flight of stairs, MP5 aimed at the landing above.
I glanced through a door into a living room. The house was furnished simply in a rustic manner, but looked comfortable. You would never know from the quiet atmosphere in the house that a zombie apocalypse was sweeping across the land outside.
Through the window, I saw some of the zombies pass by the house, nothing more than dark shapes in the night. I knew they would roam around out there until something else caught their attention and drew them away. They functioned on a very basic level, their actions controlled by the virus that infected their dead bodies. Their simple, dead minds had no reasoning power.
The people upstairs were another matter entirely. Armed, and presumably smart, they presented the greatest immediate danger to us.
I assumed there was more than one person up there, because the framed photographs on the mantelpiece in the living room showed a couple in their sixties, and whom I presumed to be two sons in their thirties.
That meant that there were potentially four armed people to deal with up there.
I told the others.
“Fuck ‘em,” Sam said. “We’ve probably got better firepower. I say we go up there and clear all the rooms.”
I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. When did we become a SWAT team? We were being sidetracked from what was important.
“Or we could just leave,” I said. “I saw a set of car keys hanging on the wall near the back door. We can take their car and get to Site Alpha Two much quicker. We aren’t here to murder people.”
“They shot at us,” Sam said.
“And who can blame them? They’re probably scared shitless, trying to protect their farm from zombies. Wouldn’t you shoot at trespassers if it was you?”
He shrugged. “I guess so.”
“What kind of car is it?” Tanya asked.
“I don’t know. The keys have the Volkswagen logo on them.”
Jax went into the living room and peered out of the window. “I don’t see any car out there, and there wasn’t one at the front of the house, either.”
I went back to the kitchen, grabbed the keys, and found a door that opened into a garage. It was neat, with tools hanging on the walls in ordered rows, a stack of tires in one corner, and a smell of oil and rubber in the air.
When I had first seen the VW keys, I had wondered if the car might be a Beetle, or something compact that we wouldn’t all fit into. I needn’t have worried; a metallic-blue Volkswagen Ca
lifornia camper van sat in the garage.
The others appeared at the door.
Jax said, “Sweet.”
“I’ll drive,” Tanya said. “We need to get the garage door open.”
“It’s automatic,” I said. “There’s a remote opener in the van.”
Tanya climbed into the driver’s seat, with Sam next to her up front. The rest of us piled into the spacious rear area. Tanya hit the button on the remote and the garage door slid slowly upward to reveal a gravel driveway beyond and a dirt road beyond that.
Tanya started the engine, turned on the headlights, and got the camper van into gear, revving the engine while she waited for the door to open enough to let the camper van through.
When we finally drove out of the garage and into the night, Tanya said, “Hang on,” as something thumped off the side of the vehicle. She gunned the engine and we shot forward down the driveway, gravel crunching under the tires, and onto the narrow dirt road.
I could hear moans beyond the windows, but we quickly left the zombies behind as we drove away, the headlights illuminating the deserted road.
“Do you know the way?” Jax asked Tanya.
Tanya nodded. “I think so.” She kept her eyes on the road ahead.
Sam turned to us, looking into the back of the van over his seat. “Did you see the way those hybrids hit the deck and came at us like spiders? That was some fucked-up shit, man.”
“Yeah,” I said. The hybrids scared me much more than the zombies. I remembered when I was reading zombie novels and playing zombie video games that there would always be a debate about shambling zombies versus running zombies. I always thought that running zombies were too dangerous. Now, I knew how true that was. The hybrids moved so fast that it would be easy to get caught by them. And they had an appetite for flesh, even rotting zombie flesh.
I thought back to how they had ignored the shambling zombies by the stone wall and come after us instead, even though we were running away. They obviously preferred their meals to be alive and kicking.
We turned off the main road—if the dirt track could be called a main road—and drove along a narrow track that cut through a wood. Dark trees rolled past my window, and I wondered how many zombies were in there among the pines. Woods inhabited by monsters were once just a thing of fairy tales, but longer. Now, the stories of flesh-eating monsters were true. And just like in the fairy tales, anyone wandering into the trees might never be seen again.
Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) Page 4