Z-Minus Box Set 2

by Perrin Briar

  “Richard?” Susan said. “Richard?”

  She laid him on his back. His breaths were gasping and raw.

  “Your inhaler,” Susan said. “Where is it?”

  She checked his pockets, but they were empty.

  “He’s infected?” Steve said, appearing at the door.

  “No,” Susan said. “He’s asthmatic. He needs his inhaler. It must have fallen out of his pocket.”

  “Then he’s screwed,” Taylor said. “There’s no way you’ll get to the third floor and back in one piece.”

  “He has a spare,” Susan said. “In his jacket.”

  “Where?” Steve said.

  Susan turned to meet his eyes.

  “On the first floor,” she said.

  “Fat lot of good it’ll do him down there,” Taylor said.

  Susan looked at the man on the floor before her, gasping like a fish out of water. She still loved him, despite him leaving her. She couldn’t face losing him. Not now. Not when she needed him most.

  “I’ll go get it,” Susan said.

  Steve stepped forward.

  “I can’t let you go down there,” he said. “We need someone to work the machine.”

  “Phil can work Archie,” Susan said. “Richard will die if he doesn’t get his shot,” Susan said.

  “You’ll die if you go down there,” Steve said.

  “I have to,” Susan said. “There’s no other way.”

  Z-MINUS: 1 hour 33 minutes

  Steve jammed the chair leg into the gap and pried the elevator doors open. He slipped his hands inside and pulled. The elevator doors groaned open, just wide enough for Susan to fit through.

  Infected howls burbled from the building’s bowels. Short sharp shrieks and guttural growls. They sounded loud, close, but the sounds were just reflecting off the glass walls. Steve looked at Susan, genuine concern on his face.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

  Susan looked back at Richard, curled up on the floor. Phil was doing everything he could to keep him comfortable.

  “The elevator is on the first floor,” Steve said. “Climb down, get the inhaler, and then get back on the elevator. We’ll turn it back on after thirty minutes and haul you up. If you’re not back in the elevator by then we won’t be able to help you. We can’t risk them getting in the elevator and hitting a button by accident and getting up to us here.”

  “Okay,” Susan said.

  She took a deep breath and stepped through the gap. There was a narrow ledge she could rest her feet on. The walls were lost to shadow after five feet. Susan sensed it was a long way down.

  “Wait,” Steve said. “Take this.”

  He handed Susan his knife – a vicious curved combat blade.

  “We’ll make a distraction over on the other side of the building,” Steve said. “Maybe we can draw them away from you.”

  “But it’ll draw more of them from the city,” Susan said.

  “At this point I’m not sure it makes much difference,” Steve said.

  He checked over his shoulder. The others were out of earshot. He still lowered his voice.

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to hold back the undead already in the building,” he said.

  The soldiers began to fire at the opposite end of the hospital corridor at the undead outside. Their gunshots were deafening, even from here, the retort bouncing off the bare walls.

  Steve nodded to Susan.

  “Show time,” he said.

  Dangling from the middle of the elevator shaft was a thick bundle of wires and cables, highlighted by the waxing moon. Susan measured the distance, bent her knees, moved her arms back and forth, let out a puff of air, said a prayer, and jumped…

  Time slowed as she sailed across the empty open space. Her eyes widened to take in the wires and cords. She opened her arms wide to avoid missing the cables entirely. The cords struck her in the face before she thought she had even reached them.

  Her arms reacted, snapping into a bear hug, wrapping around the cables tight. She felt a sharp tug as her bodyweight pulled on her arms. She swung across the open space. The cables were not flexible, and she did not reach the other side.

  She held on tight, not daring to open her eyes. She came to a stop, her arms and legs wrapped around the cables.

  “…all right?” a voice said. “Susan? Are you all right?”

  Susan turned to see Steve’s silhouette in the elevator doors. It took her a moment to find her voice.

  “Y…Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  Gunfire in the middle distance. The soldiers were still firing. Jericho whooped and roared.

  “You need to start climbing down,” Steve said.

  Susan nodded, but couldn’t relax her hands and feet. She was immobilized by fear. If she didn’t move soon she would remain there, and the soldiers would have to risk their lives to save her. Some hero she turned out to be. But finally, she began to move.

  She maintained her tight grip with her arms, and ever-so-slowly let go with her feet. She hung there a moment, her strength keeping her in place. She lowered her legs to the cables. This time she released her hands, and shuffled down a few inches. She tightened her arms again and relaxed her legs. Inch by inch, like a snake’s powerful muscle movements, she made her way down the cables.

  The square of light Steve stood in grew smaller as she descended into darkness. But it wasn’t totally dark. Her eyes adjusted to the soft moonlight that cast silhouettes of skeletal office spaces on each floor she passed. There were bloody smears like graffiti on the glass elevator walls.

  On the second floor she came across a single figure drenched in blood, seemingly lost and having been separated from the rest of its herd. A young girl, around Amy’s age, dressed in a frilly ensemble. She peered through the glass at Susan, her features lost to the darkness. She put her hand to the glass, leaving a smear.

  The only sounds were Susan’s clothes against the cables as she edged lower and lower, but even that might have been enough for the little undead girl to pick her out. Susan kept going.

  Her arms ached, burning like they were on fire. She could actually feel them tearing, her shoulders coming loose and dislodging from their sockets. She felt like she’d been climbing for hours. Sweat dimpled her skin. She knew she couldn’t hold on much longer.

  Her feet came to something solid. She felt at the object below her, unwilling to release her grip in case it wasn’t the roof of the elevator. The soles of her feet padded the flat material. It didn’t give. She gradually relaxed her grip, the floor taking her weight.

  She was in pitch darkness. No moonlight down here. Susan knelt and felt at the smooth surface of the floor with her fingertips until they caught on something: the edges of a square depression. She slipped her fingers into it and pulled.

  The latch opened, and a square of glass came up with it. Susan leaned the hatch back and peered through the hole.

  A bloodied face peered up at her.

  Susan started, skirting back on her hands and feet, smacking into a glass wall. It took a moment for realization to dawn on her, her conscious catching up with what her unconscious already knew. She edged back to the hatch and looked through it.

  The figure’s blue eyes were open, staring straight at her, unblinking. The figure was dead – really dead – squashed between a pair of other bodies. None were people she recognized. A trail of blood ran out of the elevator, bloodied footprints like hell’s breadcrumbs.

  The elevator doors on the first floor were open. She could see through them into the main entrance foyer. Things had been pushed over, destroyed and smeared with blood since she had last been there. But there were no zombies. At least, as far as she could see.

  Susan took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the hatch, her legs hanging down. The face stared up at her. What if he wasn’t really dead? Susan thought. What if this was an elaborate trap? The creatures seemed stupid and devoid of such cunning but there was so little th
ey knew about them. Wasn’t it at least possible? Yes, but unlikely. She was just coming up with excuses, reasons not to put herself at risk. But she had to go.

  She took a deep breath and dropped down. She landed on the balls of her feet, her shoes finding dried blood. She waited for something to come racing out at her, but nothing did.

  She stepped over the mutilated bodies and peered out of the elevator. The foyer was empty. She creeped out and headed toward the corridor that led to Richard’s office.

  She froze.

  A figure in her peripheral vision had his back to her. The figure was hunched, shoulders uneven, one jutting up, the other lower, at a forty-five degree angle. It stood there, unmoving.

  Susan inched back out of the corridor and hid around the corner. Sweat ran down her face in thick rivulets. She crouched under a desk. Her hands shook. She clenched them into fists, a symbol of confidence she did not feel.

  Susan picked up a handful of pencils from the floor. She tossed them toward the entrance hall. The undead was slow, his feet torn by the shards of glass on the floor, but he eventually turned to face the sound. He staggered forward in the loping stride of the undead, his feet tripping on discarded items.

  Another undead stepped from another corridor and grunted at the first. A bark. A challenge, perhaps. Susan shrank back under the desk. She waited as the two undead stood before the tossed pencil, neither moving to pick it up. My God, these things are dumb.

  Susan shook her head at her earlier concern they might be intelligent. Susan tossed the eraser out the front doors. It bounced and bounded down the stairs. The undead figures followed it out.

  Susan crawled from under the desk. She peered down the corridor again. No more undead. The undead she’d distracted were scrapping, fighting for the unruly eraser. Susan got to her feet and jogged down the corridor, hurrying past the open and closed doors, not wishing to see what was inside.

  She hustled into Richard’s office, pulling the door open to get at the coatrack. She searched through Richard’s jacket pockets until she found what she was looking for. She took out the inhaler and tucked it in her pocket. Now she just had to get back in the elevator. She checked her watch.

  She had two minutes.

  Z-MINUS: 1 hour 12 minutes

  Uh-hhhhhhhhhhhh.

  The sound was a starting pistol. Susan reacted without thought. She dropped and crouched under a desk. A zombie stood in the corridor, visible through the doorway. Had it seen her?

  The creature wandered around, in a circle, scratched it’s head with one hand, and its ass with the other, both actions stimulating the same number of brain cells. Evidently, it hadn’t spotted her and was of no danger yet, but how was she going to get to the elevator in time? She had one minute forty seconds left.

  The zombie began to turn. It seemed to look right at her, but its eyes swept over her. He turned again to look out the door, and once again scratched his head and ass.

  Was he repeating his actions over and over? Susan thought.

  That was how superstitions were thought to have started; someone did something, and it resulted in a positive result, and so they repeated the same action again, and if the result was the same, they learned that the action produced a positive result, and so it became a habit. When someone came along and saw the action and the positive outcome, they copied it, thus giving birth to a new superstition.

  What had caused the zombie to have begun his cycle, she didn’t know, but here he was, completing his performance. He turned on the spot, his eyes once again passing over her, glazed and watery, and then he was facing the opposite direction. He raised his hands to scratch again…

  Now or never.

  Susan leaped from her hiding place, ran around the desk, and behind the creature. As he turned and moved, she mimicked him. Susan clamped a hand over her mouth and nose to quell the monster’s stench. The zombie completed its pirouette. Susan ran down the corridor and around the corner. She stopped, leaning her back against the wall.

  One minute left. There were no footsteps behind her, no suggestion the zombie had heard, seen or followed her. She should have just moved on, down to the elevator, but she couldn’t help but check in case the zombie cornered her in the elevator. She leaned around the wall…

  Her face was almost ripped off as the zombie stumbled into her. Susan backed away, turned, and ran for the elevator. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Her over-wariness had almost cost her – and Richard’s – life. Idiot!

  She didn’t turn to look back. She got into the small glass elevator and repeatedly jabbed the button for the fifth floor. There was no friendly female voice, no lights. It still didn’t have power. Susan checked her watch. Ten seconds left.

  It seemed an eternity. Susan could barely breathe. The zombie could appear any second…

  Four seconds left…

  Three…

  Two…

  One…

  The elevator lights came on. Susan jabbed the fifth floor button.

  “Going up,” a calm female voice said.

  The doors began to slide closed.

  A mutilated hand reached inside. The elevator doors stopped and began to open.

  Susan was frozen with fear. She pressed herself against the wall, wishing it would swallow her.

  The door revealed the undead creature, like a conjuror’s trick. A corner of his mouth was turned up into a permanent sneer.

  Susan shut her eyes. Amy was there to greet her. Her beaming smile, her beautiful face, curled up into a smile… And the thought she might never see her again, never lay hands on her, nor tuck her in at night…

  It was all Susan needed. She opened her eyes.

  Steve’s combat knife was already in her hands. She hacked at the zombie’s groping arms. She sliced open his forearms. The undead’s fingers danced on the floor in their death throes. But the zombie still came on, undaunted.

  Susan shifted her grip, the blade facing up. She blindly raised it in a reverse stabbing motion, piercing the monster under the chin. Its blood oozed over Susan’s hand. She held the zombie back with her free hand as she impaled it again and again.

  “Going up,” the elevator’s voice said.

  The elevator doors attempted to close again, but jolted when the sensors picked up the zombie obstruction.

  Susan screamed and stabbed harder, the zombie’s lidless eyes glaring at her. Susan pushed the zombie back. He stumbled, leaning dangerously back, as if he was losing his balance.

  Susan jammed her finger on the fifth floor button again. So hard, she thought she might have broken her finger.

  “Going up,” the elevator voice said.

  “Come on,” Susan said. “Come on!”

  The doors began to close. The zombie found his balance, and leaned forward. Behind him, the two scrapping zombies from outside were approaching. If the door didn’t close in time, Susan was dead.

  The door edged closer to shutting. Just a few inches remained. The lead zombie reached out with his hands…

  The elevator doors shut. The zombie, a split second later, banged into the doors. The elevator whirred and vibrated as it rose. Susan clutched the knife close, and cried. Her body was still shaking. She was alive. She let herself smile.

  Thud.

  Thud, thud.

  They came from the roof. What the blazes? The groans of the undead answered Susan’s curiosity. Had some of them managed to pry an elevator door open? Who cares. The point was, they were here.

  Susan jumped, scrabbling to grab the hatch that was still open from when she’d dropped down earlier. She slammed it shut. Scrabbling hands felt for the latch, feeling for something, anything, to seize and tear at, but the surface was glass and difficult to grip.

  At this rate, the undead would get to the open elevator doors on the fifth floor before she would. They would stumble inside and attack the soldiers, who had their backs turned, drawing away as many of the undead from Susan as they could.

  Worse, Richard was lying on the f
loor, not far from the elevator doors. He’d be helpless. It was a nightmare.

  Susan pulled the emergency stop lever. She needed time to think. The undead’s feet shuffled on the elevator roof. Now what was she going to do?

  She listened.

  There were no scrabbling noises on the door side of the elevator. Undead weren’t waiting to get on the elevator. She could get out at the third or fourth floor and find a way up. She picked up a walking stick that had belonged to one of the dead men. She used it to pry the elevator doors open in the hope of being greeted by an empty floor.

  She pressed on the stick with all her weight and strength. She bounced, forcing the doors open an inch at a time. Three inches wide, the gap was wide enough for Susan to know she was out of luck. She put her hand to the concrete wall. She was between floors. Susan ran her hands over it and smacked it with the palm of her hand.

  “Damn!” she said.

  How was she going to get out of this situation? The creatures on the roof continued to beat on the roof. It sounded like heavy rain.

  Then she had an idea.

  Susan removed the emergency stop lever. The elevator began to rise again. Susan jabbed at the opposite end of the elevator with her stick, getting the undead’s attention. With any luck, they would be distracted and wouldn’t stumble through the empty elevator doorway. The elevator kept rising.

  They would be approaching the fifth floor any moment. Susan’s stomach twisted. She kept tapping at the wall. There was a crunch, a grunt, and blood ran down the gap in the elevator doors. At least one zombie had attempted to make it through the empty elevator doorway, and had been crushed in the attempt.

  Ding.

  The doors slid open. A waterfall of blood oozed from the roof. Snapped bones and a decapitated head lay on the floor. An undead figure stood before her, its back to her. The rest of the undead were still on the elevator roof.

  The single undead stumbled forward, toward Richard, who was curled up on the floor, his eyes wide and terrified. He shuffled back an inch, unable to do more. Susan was meant to bring salvation. Instead, she’d brought death.