by M. Lorrox
Jambavan hears him, but he’s still defending the doorway to the spiral stairs with Lance. He looks up at the taller, older, but untrained vampire. “Can you manage?”
Lance nods. “Go!” Then he takes another step down the stairs as Jambavan scoots past him.
Jambavan cuts ahead of the last few vampires in line and jumps out the window to the roof. He scans the area and spots the rushing zombies. He leaps from one section of the roof to the other and runs to intercept them.
Skip swivels the rifle around to his front. “Jambavan, I think we can use the guns!”
Jambavan’s right arm is still in a sling, and with his left hand, he sheaths his push dagger and draws a pistol. “Agreed!” He takes aim and fires while he runs. -Thwoop!- -Thwoop!- Two headshots for the two closest zombies. The next one is alone, and he slams it in the forehead with the pistol’s butt, and it drops then rolls off the roof. The next two zombies are coming but are a ways off, so he turns around to doublecheck the surroundings.
Smoke trickles out from some of the castle’s windows while flames tickle the tops of others. On the ground below, zombies hear the gunfire above and the corpses falling against the roof. As the corpses crash down to the ground, splitting shrubs and breaking tree branches, other zombies rush the building. Sturdy gutter pipes are bolted into the corners of some of the castle’s stone walls, and determined zombies start to climb them.
On the east and west side of the castle’s main building are adjoining sections of the castle, called the East and West Ranges. Their roofs are closest to the ground and are easiest to climb up to. When zombies manage to get on top of them, they find ladders and stairs that lead to the main building’s roof.
Jambavan turns back to the two zombies he was waiting to engage with. -Thwoop!- -Thwoop!- Then he notices that at least fifty other zombies are now en route to the survivors, climbing up from below. “Lots incoming!”
Skip brings the scope of the rifle to his eye, but he’s not in a great location to shoot from. I need elevation. He turns and looks up at the parapet of the South Tower, then without another thought he runs back to the window. He climbs inside and looks around.
Lance is fighting in the stairwell. He doesn’t have much room to fight, but at least it bottlenecks the zombies for him. A zombie grabs his foot and rips it into its mouth.
“Ahhh!” Lance tears his leg back, now an ounce lighter.
Skip slips behind Lance and runs up the stairs to the attic. There, he pulls on a rope to lower the stairs leading up to the South Tower’s parapet, opens the trapdoor at the stair’s top, and climbs out.
He slams the trap door shut, then he rushes to the edge overlooking the castle’s roof. He plants a foot on the one of the taller blocks of the parapet, and he raises the scope to his eye. Jambavan is firing at zombies on the east side of the roof. Skip swivels to cover the west side of the roof, where zombies are ten yards from the group. He pulls back the rifle’s bolt, then he pushes it forward and loads a bullet into the chamber. He pulls the trigger. -click-
“Fuck! Must be a safety.” He finds it and slides the small button. Then, he aims at the front-most zombie and sees its top half explode into a red mist from a single shot from Harold’s blunderbuss. Skip finds the next closest zombie and fires the rifle. -Kitchew!-
In the Chinook overhead, Charlie helps Danny position the helicopter. “Back a little more... More… Come on, damn it!”
Danny grimaces as he pulls on the cyclic slightly with one hand as he keeps his other hand on the collective lever. “Like I said, drastic in a helo is death, and I ain’t ever pinnacled before, so take it easy!”
On the roof of the FAA, two hundred and eighty yards away, General Riley hears the gunfire. He raises his binoculars and sees zombies climbing up to the roof and the helicopter positioning over the castle. “No, no, no! We can’t risk this! Who the fuck gave the order for an evac?” He turns and shouts, “Marine! Grab the RPGs from the east corner, then get your fucking ass over here! Now goddamn it! NOW!”
Madeline, still wearing the scrubs she stole, walks around a corner while looking at the clipboard in her hands. Nobody coming. She lowers the papers and hugs the wall with the door to the Costanzas’ room. When she gets to their door, she pretends to check something while listening. The TV is on. Then she hears voices coming from people inside the room.
“My sister was on the tour in DC. The one my mom sent Captain Sarkis to go and protect.”
“I gathered that. Korina is really good, dude, and she’s also pretty stubborn. I’m sure she got to them. I’m sure they’re okay.”
“I really hope so. Jambavan went too, and my family’s friend is there looking after my sis, but seeing those big auto-turrets and hearing about the situation doesn’t make me feel any better.”
A doctor rushes past Madeline, and she scans the hallway for anyone else coming her way. Clear for the moment. She motions Steve and Li Chen over.
Li Chen places his hand on her shoulder, and he pulls her back, away from the door. He holds up three fingers on one hand and lightly grabs the door’s handle with the other. He puts a finger down. Then another. When he drops the last one, he pushes open the door, and the three of them rush inside.
Eddy jumps off the edge of Enrique’s bed at the sight of hospital staff barging into the room. “Can’t you knock? Jeez.”
“Sorry.” Li Chen runs up to Eddy and punches him in the face, sending him to the floor. Steve sprints to Enrique’s bed and slams him in the face too, but he didn’t get as clean of a hit on the squire. Madeline stands back, closes the door, and blocks it.
Eddy spins on all fours to protect his head in case another strike is coming. He looks up at his attacker. “What the fuck?” Oh shit. “What the hell do you want? Did you steal my ring?”
Li Chen sneers. “Yeah, and we know you faked it. Where’s the original picture—the one BEFORE you photoshopped it?”
Shit. They could tell. Enrique growls at Steve, who holds him down against the bed. “Get the fuck off me!” He throws his unbroken arm up at Steve’s elbow and pushes him away.
Even though he’s not trained in any martial art, Steve knows he’s a stocky dude. He also watches a lot of classic WWF. Instead of getting pushed off or trying to catch himself on the bed, he jumps toward Enrique and slams his torso into Enrique’s gut. “Shut up.”
Eddy springs to his feet, still facing Li Chen. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and unless you get out of here, I’ll scream my head off, and you’ll have a fun time dealing with the elders and guards that’ll rush in. They might have already heard.”
Li Chen pulls his knife and steps toward Eddy. “Nah, and I don’t think you’ll scream, because if you do, you’ll taste this blade and be flying out the window before anyone reaches you.”
Enrique stops squirming under Steve’s weight.
Steve leans off Enrique’s gut to press on the squire’s shoulders again, and as he moves, he flips open his knife. “Yeah, shut up.” He moves his sweaty, empty hand to Enrique’s mouth and holds the knife up over him. Enrique stares into Steve’s eyes and doesn’t move.
Madeline takes a step away from the door. “Okay, so just give us the picture or whatever, and we’ll leave you alone, okay?”
Eddy wants to look at her—to see if she’s being genuine—but he knows he can’t take his eyes off the knife in Li Chen’s hand. His father taught him that when you’re threatened with a deadly weapon, you focus your attention on it; never underestimate it or the person wielding it. “Look, just calm down. We don’t want any trouble. Nobody needs to get hurt.”
“Apparently, they do.” Li Chen sends a quick nod to Steve, and before Eddy knows it, he hears Enrique groan.
Madeline gasps.
Eddy still doesn’t look away from the knife in Li Chen’s hand. “You’re fucking insane.”
“The clock’s ticking now—give us the original image or wait and let your friend bleed out.”
“He took
the picture, it’s on his phone.” Eddy motions to a little table beside the bed. “Just take it and get the hell out of here.”
Li Chen flashes his filed canine teeth. “You go get it. Tick-tock, tick-tock.”
Fucking shit. Eddy steps back, turns in a flash and grabs the phone, then immediately locks his eyes back on the knife in Li Chen’s hand. He tosses the phone to him—he aims it at the hand with the knife—hoping Li Chen would fumble in trying to catch it, but Madeline is fast, and she scoots over and snatches the phone from the air.
Her voice trembles. “Okay, we got it, let’s get out of here.”
Li Chen pushes her aside and out of his path to Eddy. “Find the picture first.”
She looks down at the phone and hits a button to turn it on. Then she finds the gallery and sees a bunch of pictures of the ring. “Yeah, they’re on here.”
Eddy swallows. “Alright? Now get out of here!”
Li Chen smiles and starts to lower the knife. Then he lunges with it toward Eddy’s stomach.
Eddy, ready for an attack, feels a split-second of relief, realizing how straightforward it will be to spin to the side and scissor his arms. Eddy knows that if he times it right, he should be able to hyperextend Li Chen’s elbow with a two-point strike. That would both disarm Li Chen and render his dominant arm useless. Unfortunately, Eddy doesn’t get the satisfaction.
“No!” Madeline jumps in front of Eddy and takes the length of the blade just below her ribs. It stabs through her liver and slices her intestines. She drops Enrique’s phone, collapses into Eddy, and they both fall backward toward the wall.
Li Chen holds the bloody knife in his hand, and he looks down at Madeline, who clutches her side as she hits the ground. His eyes are wide with panic. He shoots them to the door. “Someone’s coming. Steve, let’s go!”
Li Chen grabs the phone as Steve pulls his shorter but wider blade out of Enrique’s lower abs. The two of them blast through the door, knocking into someone in the hallway. Li Chen and Steve don’t bother looking to see who it was; they just turn and start to run down the hall.
“Hey!” June is sent flying toward the opposite wall, the new gown the doctor gave her to wear flows in the air like a flag in the wind. She slams against the wall and regains her footing, then she growls at the two guys wearing scrubs as they hurry away.
She turns and walks into the room they came out of—the room the doctor said Eddy was in. She sees someone she doesn’t recognize in a bed, bleeding and clutching his stomach, and Eddy on the ground with another person. There’s blood everywhere!
Before Eddy even knows there was someone in the doorway, June is gone.
She hauls ass after the guys that knocked into her, tearing through the hall with bare feet, moving so fast that the air ripping past her head chills her shaved scalp.
Charlie yells down the long, empty cabin of the Chinook to the cockpit. “I’m opening the gate! I gotta get down there!”
Danny hears him but doesn’t respond. He’s preparing to do the pinnacle maneuver on the castle’s roof—setting the rear of the helicopter down while the rest of the aircraft hovers. The technique is challenging for a pair of seasoned pilots working together, who fly missions day in and day out. For Danny—who hasn’t flown in decades, whose vision isn’t what it used to be…especially in the deepening dark, and who never had to fly a Chinook solo during Vietnam—it’s tasking every ounce of everything he has.
Charlie throws a switch, and the rear gate begins to lower. He empties a drink bottle he filled with blood and tosses it aside. He draws the Ketsueki Seishin katana from its long red-and-black saya. The drink bottle rolls across the helicopter’s metal floor as Danny angles the rear end down.
Charlie finds a place along the wall to wedge the sword’s saya. When it’s secured, he looks out the opened gate, and adrenaline floods his veins. He shivers as it courses through his body, and he leaps down.
He lands fifteen feet below, dents the roof, and drops a knee. Jambavan is on his right, and the other survivors are huddled together to his left. He stands and sprints straight toward the group.
Irene, one of the Smithsonian employees, cowers as the man who just jumped out of a helicopter with a samurai sword runs grimacing straight at her. The skin on his face shakes with his powerful strides, and his uniform tugs against his muscles. She blinks, and when her eyes reopen, he’s leaping over her head.
Charlie is jumping over all their heads. As he clears the group, he looks down and sees a man holding an antique gun. “Hold your fire!”
Harold jolts with the shock of a voice booming from above him, and he nearly drops the freshly reloaded blunderbuss.
Before his feet reconnect with the roof, Charlie slices the heads off two zombies. Then, he lands and continues running. In front of him now are thirty zombies, all of which are sprinting toward him, from the front and sides. He rushes the zombies that are closest to him and slices them down. Then he turns and cuts one from the bottom up, then he brings his blade back down and across another at an angle.
Skip, at the edge of the parapet, smiles. “I knew you’d come!” He raises the rifle and watches the group of kids, chaperones, and employees through the scope. If any zombies get past the knights, I’ll pick them off.
-Crash!-
Skip drops his eye from the scope and looks toward the sound. Below him, the opened window frame rattles and spills its last few shards of glass while a zombie falls away and rolls off the side of the building. Lance must be fighting in the room now.
Another zombie follows out the window, but it lands on its feet, and it runs toward the group. Or maybe he’s dead. Skip fires and drills a bullet through the back of its skull. Another zombie starts crawling out of the window, and Skip fires straight down and kills it before it reaches the roof. Its torso leans out the window and spills blood and brains down the South Tower’s outer wall. How many bullets left? I think only a few more in this magazine. I’ll count them from now on.
Charlie puts some space between himself and the group of survivors, and now, zombies surround him. He swings the great blade back, then he spins it horizontally at neck level in a devastating strike. He decapitates five zombies and is reaching for the sixth, when yet another zombie tackles him from behind.
Charlie falls, and the cursed blade smacks him in the face, cutting him across the brow and cheek. He rolls onto his stomach to stand back up, but a zombie leaps onto him and bites down hard into his neck. FUCK! He flails his elbow back, and it cracks the zombie’s sternum. The impact sends the zombie cascading away, but its teeth were clenched, and it tears out a piece of Charlie’s flesh.
The bite nicks Charlie’s jugular, and he feels the warm blood spill down his side. He squeezes the handle of his sword with one hand and grabs at his neck with the other. Charlie stands and swings the blade at the zombies near him. He cuts through three, from shoulder to chest, chest to ribs, and ribs to guts, then he’s tackled down again. He drops the sword and gets his arm below him to break his fall, but there’s more weight pressing down on him than he expected, and he still bangs his head on the roof. He’s stunned, and he instinctively buries his head and neck between his arms.
Zombies pile on him and start to bite down on him through his uniform. One starts gnawing on the tightened skin on the back of his fist.
He yells for help, but his scream is muffled by the zombies frenzied on top of him. No one hears him over the gunshots from Jambavan and Skip and the double rotors of the Chinook.
The group of survivors watch in earnest as the huge helicopter finally, delicately, sets its rear down against the roof.
June chases after the boys that ran from Eddy’s room. She no longer feels the cold of the tiles beneath her bare feet, nor the chill of the air on her shaved head. All she feels is anger. A burning, searing, fireball of rage.
She comes around a corner, and ahead she sees them rush through a fire exit to a stairwell. She follows them down the stairs and then out the exit-only
door.
Along the outside edges of the hospital building, flood lights cast long shadows of the boys as they run across the lawn. Now that June is outside and in the open, she runs faster. Within a second of leaving the hospital, she catches up to the slower and bulkier of the two guys, halfway across the lawn between the hospital and the tree line.
“Hey!” She grabs him on the shoulder and squeezes her fingers into his skin.
“Shit!” Steve stops and turns to face his attacker. He’s shocked to see a thin teenage girl in a hospital gown with her head shaved standing below him.
Li Chen stops and turns too, and he does a doubletake.
“DID YOU HURT THEM?” June growls through her teeth at the two larger and older boys.
Steve snickers and turns to run away, and June claws out at his face. She tears her nails from his forehead, across his ear, and down his neck.
“Ahh!”
Blood and tiny pieces of his skin drip from her fingers.
“Fuck!” He recoils away from her as he grasps his ear, checking that he still has it.
June stretches her arms out to the side and leans forward. “Why did you hurt them?”
Li Chen storms toward her and reaches for her.
She stands her ground.
He shoves her. “Fuck off, weirdo.”
She twists with his push and grabs his arm with her other hand. She pulls; he is knocked off balance and falls past her to the ground, rolling away. “You’re those punks, the Red Fangs. You won’t hurt anyone ever again!” She leaps at Steve, snarling and screaming.
He shields his face with his hand, and he falls backward on the ground. She bites into his arm and doesn’t stop chomping until she has bitten a piece of his flesh off. He pulls his arm away, yelping, and she grabs onto the top of his head by his thick, curly hair.
“Get off me, you crazy bitch!”