Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead)

by Harbinger, Shaun

  We bumped along the track for half an hour before emerging from the trees. Tanya hit the brakes and the camper van came to a stop in front of a tall wire fence topped with razor wire. Beyond the fence sat a five-story building identical to the one on Apocalypse Island. Although the second floor windows were all dark, the lights on the other floors were switched on, giving the impression that the building was full of people.

  A small yellow sign on the fence had six black words stenciled onto it: Government property. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

  “I can’t see any people,” Jax said, leaning forward in her seat. “But why are all the lights still on?”

  “Nobody bothered to turn them off,” I guessed. “When everybody is being eaten by zombies, saving energy isn’t a priority.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Tanya said. “For all we know, there might be another reason they lost contact with Alpha One. Maybe everybody in there is alive and well.”

  I wasn’t sure about that, and Tanya herself didn’t sound convinced. There was an eerie, deathly-quiet atmosphere around Site Alpha Two.

  “So what’s the plan?” Sam asked.

  “We don’t have one.” Tanya turned in her seat. “Anyone have any ideas?”

  “I think we need to take it slow, and see what we’re getting ourselves into before we go in there all guns blazing,” I said.

  “Typical,” Sam said.

  “So do you think the best idea is to go storming through the door and advertise our presence to everybody in there, zombie or otherwise?” I asked, annoyed that Sam seemed to be contradicting everything I said just for the hell of it. “Didn’t Hart tell you about patient zero? Because he told me there’s a creature in there that’s worse than any hybrid. Do you want to go blundering into the building if that’s waiting in there for you?”

  “Of course not, man, but there’s such a thing as too much caution. We can’t go sneaking around forever. The chopper will be coming back for us the day after tomorrow. By then, we need to get to the fourth-floor labs, grab the H1-whatever, and get out again. We can’t do all that by fucking about.”

  “All I’m saying is that we should try to get some idea of what we’re stepping into,” I said.

  “We know what we’re stepping into, man. It’s called shit.”

  “I have an idea,” Johnny said. I looked over at him. He had one of the maps of the facility open on his lap. “Look here,” he said, pointing at a small structure located inside the fence but separate from the main building. “This is a security guard station. And according to this diagram, there are monitors in there. What if they monitor the security cameras in the main building? We could see what’s going on in there before we walk in through the front door.”

  “Good idea,” Tanya said. “Where is that building?”

  Johnny studied the map and looked out of the camper van window to get his bearings. “If you follow the road around to the left, we should come to a main gate. This building is about fifty yards inside from there.”

  Tanya turned the steering wheel and took us along the road that ran around the perimeter of compound. I looked closely at Site Alpha Two as we followed the fence toward the main gate. There was no movement in there that I could see. If the place was full of zombies, they were waiting quietly inside.

  But I knew that as soon as we entered the building, they wouldn’t be quiet anymore.

  Chapter Ten

  We arrived at the main gate at the same time as a light drizzle began falling. I hadn’t noticed that the sky, which had been clear earlier, was now murky. Even the moon, which had been so bright when the Chinook had dropped us off in the field, was partly obscured from our sight by dark clouds. Typical. Just as we were about to enter a dangerous area, the night got dark. It would make it much more difficult to see if there were zombies or hybrids wandering around inside the compound.

  The gate was closed, but when Sam got out of the camper van and went to check if it was locked, it swung open. Sam waited while Tanya drove us inside before closing the gate again. When he got back into the vehicle, I asked him why had had closed it.

  “We don’t know what’s in those woods, man. We don’t want something following us in here.”

  I nodded. His argument was sound. On a quiet night like this, even the gentle idling noise made by the camper van’s engine would drift through the trees, attracting whatever was in those woods. It might be a good idea to barricade the gate somehow, but then we could be locking ourselves in with a much worse monster than anything outside the compound.

  The guard station was a single-story brick building with lighted windows, sitting across the parking lot from the main building. A few cars were parked in the lot, waiting for owners who would never return. The guard station had a single door, which had a glass panel set into it at eye level. Sam checked it out, peering through the glass before giving us the thumbs-up signal. “It’s clear,” he said, opening the door.

  Tanya switched off the engine and sudden silence descended. That silence seemed to be laced with an anticipation of danger, as if something was going to come quietly out of the night and take us one by one, like an owl swooping noiselessly onto its prey, razor sharp claws bared.

  I had to stop thinking like that or I was going to spook myself to the point that every tiny noise was going to make me jump.

  We got out of the van and walked through the cold drizzle to the guard station.

  It was warm inside the small building, the radiators on the wall throwing out more than enough heat to combat the chill of the night. There was a single main room, a restroom, and a storeroom that held a filing cabinet and a coffee machine.

  The main room had a row of a six monitors affixed to one of the walls, each with a number 1-6 painted on the wall above it, with a row of desks and chairs beneath, each desk holding a small control panel. The monitors were switched on, displaying black and white images of the parking lot, the perimeter fence, and various corridors that I assumed were inside the main building. A row of walkie-talkies sat in a charger on one of the desks.

  “The main building looks deserted,” Jax said, watching the monitors.

  It was true that the screens seemed to show an empty building, but they only showed corridors. The only room interiors shown were two small rooms that looked like the mirrored room I had been held in at Alpha One.

  “There are only six monitors,” I said. “That’s a huge building, so these screens aren’t showing everything in there. The guards must select which cameras to monitor using the control panels.”

  I took a seat at one of the desks and looked at the controls. There were two rows of white buttons beneath labels that denoted which camera they were related to. There was a small joystick that I assumed controlled the cameras’ movements. There was also a button that said Audio with an On and Off position. It was currently turned to off, and the button for the Level 1 Main Corridor was depressed. I clicked the button next to it, labeled Level 5 Elevators, and one of the screens changed the image to show three closed elevator doors and a section of corridor. The camera was obviously set high up on the wall opposite the elevators, the image looking down from that vantage point.

  Something moved across the screen suddenly. A woman in a skirt and blouse came into view, walking along the corridor slowly, aimlessly. She wore thick-rimmed glasses that were broken, the right half of the frame hanging loosely, the lens missing. That didn’t seem to bother her. She stared vacantly ahead as if in a trance. I couldn’t see any wounds on her that would indicate that she’d been bitten but because the image was black and white, I had no idea if her flesh was mottled blue or if her eyes were the hateful yellow of the zombie. She passed from the view of the camera.

  “What’s up with her, man?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Everyone took a seat and began hitting various buttons on the control panels, switching cameras until they found something of interest.

  After a few
minutes, each monitor showed a very different scene to the one it had displayed when we’d first entered the room.

  I studied each monitor in turn. The second floor main corridor was blacked out. It looked like the power had been cut from that floor, although the cameras were still working so they must have been operating on a separate electrical circuit.

  The fourth floor elevator camera showed the closed doors of the elevators and, lying in front of them, the bodies of four security guards, all lying face down and dressed in the same uniforms and caps as the guards at Alpha One. They were covered in blood and guts. A dark pool of blood had spread across the floor from where the bodies lay. Had they been killed by something that had ripped out their insides, or had they been gutted after death? They hadn’t turned, suggesting a cause of death other than a zombie bite.

  The first floor reception area seemed deserted. When we went through the main door into the building, this would be where we’d begin our journey to the fourth-floor labs. The camera showed a wide-open space, decorated with a few large potted plants and a seating area. The reception desk itself sat behind a semi-circular wooden counter. The camera also showed the three closed elevator doors. But unlike the fourth floor, there was no sign of carnage here.

  I turned to the others. “At least our entry point into the building looks safe enough.”

  Tanya nodded. “Well, it’s not crawling with nasties, anyway.” She pointed to the monitor that showed the guards lying dead by the elevators on the fourth floor. “But what the hell happened to them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Sam said, “It looks like a straight forward snatch and grab to me, man. We go into the reception area, get an elevator up to the fourth floor, step over the bodies, and go down this corridor to the lab.” He pointed to the next monitor, which showed the deserted fourth-floor corridor. The lab doors were all closed. If there were any nasties on that floor, they were hopefully sealed behind those doors. “Then we get the H1 stuff, ride the elevator back to the first floor, and get the fuck out of there. We spend the rest of tonight, and all of tomorrow, in the van. The day after that we drive to the pick-up point for one o’ clock. It’s so easy, it’s almost like a vacation.”

  “It sounds too easy,” Tanya said.

  I didn’t say anything, but I agreed with Tanya. I wanted this mission to be as easy as Sam had said, but I didn’t dare hope that it would be. My hopes had been destroyed too many times in the past.

  The other two monitors showed the facility’s cafeteria, which had at least fifty zombies wandering between the tables, and the third-floor corridor, which was deserted. Unlike the other floors, where the doors were all closed and presumably locked, with access only being granted to holders of the proper security clearance cards, the third floor seemed to be a communal area. The doors were all open.

  “What level is the cafeteria on?” I asked.

  “Third floor,” Johnny said.

  I leaned closer to the monitor showing the third-floor corridor. “Strange.”

  “What is it?” Jax asked.

  “See the cafeteria door? It’s open. I think it’s this door here.” I pointed to one of the doors leading off the deserted third-floor corridor on the other screen.

  Jax nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s it.”

  I looked at her. “So, why aren’t those zombies wandering out into the corridor? We’ve seen how they usually act; they wander everywhere. But these are acting differently. It’s like they’re huddling together for protection. But there’s no danger in the corridor that I can see.”

  Jax said, “Try some of the other rooms on that floor. There must be something there.”

  I pressed a button labeled Level 3 Meeting Room 1. The screen showed a typical meeting room with a long table running down the center of the room, chairs on either side. A large screen at the front of the room was turned off.

  Pressing the next button showed us Level 3 Meeting Room 2. It was identical to the other meeting room, except for one thing: lying on the floor in one corner, among a mess of blood and entrails were a man and a woman. Both of them wore white lab coats, although the amount of blood made that difficult to distinguish. Their bodies lay at unnatural angles, as if they had been tossed into the corner like discarded, worn-out dolls.

  “Holy fuck, they’re hybrids,” Sam said.

  He was right; the parts of flesh that were visible in the gory mess showed the dark web of veins beneath the skin that was typical of hybrids.

  Blood covered the walls in patterns that I knew from watching cop shows to be arterial sprays. A smear of it led from the bodies, across the carpet, to an area off camera.

  “So now we know what the zombies are afraid of,” I said. “Hybrids eat them. So all the zombies have moved into the cafeteria to stay off the dinner menu.”

  “Ironic,” Jax said. “But what killed the hybrids?” She leaned forward and moved the joystick on the control panel, panning the camera along the bloody trail on the floor. The trail ended abruptly, and then seemed to smear up the wall. Jax panned the camera up.

  The blood disappeared into a large, dark, square hole near the ceiling.

  “That’s the air vent, man,” Sam said.

  The metal grille was hanging loosely by one of its corners beneath the hole, bent out of shape as if something had smashed it open.

  I sat back in my seat and looked out of the window at the building beyond the parking lot.

  It seemed that patient zero had become a creature so strong and vicious that was capable of killing hybrids.

  It was hunting for prey.

  And it was in the air vents.

  Chapter Eleven

  “We don’t have a choice, man, we have to go in.” Sam was pacing back and forth in front of the monitors, glancing at them every now and then. I wasn’t sure if he was actually as brave as he wanted us to believe, or if he was scared and dared not show it.

  “He’s right,” Tanya said. “It doesn’t matter what’s in that building, we have to go in there and get the chemical. If we don’t, we’re as good as dead anyway.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” I said. “I just wish we knew where that creature was so we could avoid it.”

  “It won’t matter,” Sam said. “We’ll be in and out before that…thing…even knows we’re there.”

  “We can’t just go blundering in there without knowing where it is. We’ll all be killed.” I wanted to add, “And then what will happen to Lucy?” but I didn’t.

  “I have an idea,” Jax said. “What if two people stay here and watch the cameras while the other three go inside? It might give the three people inside a better chance if they get an advance warning of what’s ahead of them.”

  “How do we communicate?” Tanya asked.

  Jax pointed at the walkie-talkies lined up in the charger.

  “So who stays and who goes?” Sam asked.

  “We’ll draw straws,” Tanya said. “There must be something we can use in here.”

  “There’s a filing cabinet in the other room,” I said. “We can cut up strips of a piece of paper.”

  Sam went into the other room and came back with a deck of cards. “I found these. The guards must get bored in here.” He placed the deck on the table. “We all take a card. The two people who draw the highest numbers get to stay here.”

  It sounded reasonable enough. I cut the deck and drew a card. The three of spades. I sighed as I showed it to the others. It looked like I was going into the building.

  Jax took a card, frowned, and put it face up on the table. Five of hearts.

  Johnny took the nine of clubs, Tanya drew the ten of hearts, and Sam ended up with the six of diamonds.

  So Tanya and Johnny were going to watch the cameras while Jax, Sam, and I went into the main building. I took a deep breath and tried to prepare myself mentally for going inside a building full of zombies, hybrids, and something that was even worse. There was nothing I could tell myself that would stop the shaki
ng in my hands.

  I put one of those hands on the Desert Eagle at my hip. If the end came while I was in that building, I was going to make sure it came quickly.

  We each took a walkie-talkie and checked that they were working. Sam and Jax stuffed theirs into their backpacks and switched them off to save the batteries. I clicked mine on. We would only need one between us unless we got separated, and I had no intention of letting that happen. I clipped it to my backpack strap, on my chest, so that I didn’t have to hold it. I could simply reach up and press the Talk button.

  Tanya and Johnny took seats in front of the monitors, placing a walkie-talkie between them on the desk and turning it on. They switched two of the monitors to the level 1 reception area, and the level 1 elevators.

  Sam looked at Jax and me. “Okay, guys, we can do this just like I said. A quick smash and grab. We’ll be back here in ten minutes.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely trying to psych us up, or if he was trying to reassure himself that this was going to be all right. It didn’t really matter; his pep talk had zero effect on me. I was dreading going into that building, and the greatest motivational coach on earth wouldn’t be able to talk me out of my fear.

  I picked up my baseball bat and stepped out into the night. The drizzle had become a heavy rain, hissing down on the parking lot, pounding the cars.

  “Let’s move,” Sam said, jogging toward the main entrance of the building.

  I picked up my pace but was in no hurry to go inside, despite the rain. This might be the last time I breathed fresh air, might be the last time I was ever outdoors. Once I went through that door, I might never come back.