by Perrin Briar
Susan gathered her courage, took out Steve’s combat knife, and threw herself forward. Blood speckled her face from the roof, but she didn’t stop. Her knife punctured the zombie’s body. She fell upon him and stabbed at the creature mercilessly over and over until she was bloody up to her elbows.
The zombie reached out and grabbed Richard by the wrist. Susan slammed the knife into the back of the zombie’s head. It gargled a final warning. Its body relaxed.
Richard opened his eyes. It appeared to take a great deal of effort. He was pale, his lips blue. He was breathing silently, his chest barely moving. It was a bad sign.
“No…” Susan said. “No, no, no, no, no!”
Susan pulled Richard into her lap, helping him to sit up so his lungs expanded to their full size. She put the inhaler in his mouth. She waited, but nothing happened.
“Breathe,” Susan said. “Richard. Breathe!”
His lips were white. There was nothing but a small rasp squeezing past his lips. Tears spilled down Susan’s cheeks.
“Please, breathe,” Susan said. “I can’t lose you.”
She formed a fist and beat him on the chest. She didn’t know why she did that. Was it out of anger? Or desperation? Or some extrasensory perception that operated under the radar? She did it again and again. She roared and pounded him one last time.
Richard shot up, into a sitting position, breathing in deep. Susan pressed the button on the inhaler. Richard coughed, spluttering, and tried to remove the pump, but Susan kept it in his mouth.
“Breathe,” she said. “A few more times.”
Richard did, his breaths coming stronger, until air filled his lungs completely.
“You… you saved me,” Richard said. “How?”
“It doesn’t matter how,” Susan said. “You’re alive. That’s the important thing.”
Richard smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. “For saving my life.”
Susan smiled. Richard raised a hand to her cheek.
“Really,” Richard said. “Thank you.”
Susan rocked him gently in her lap.
The gunfire stopped, and the soldiers approached, taking in the scene of a blood-splattered Susan and the undead corpse. Jericho shook his head in unveiled respect.
“You got some cohunes on you, girl,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
“There are more of them,” Susan said. “On top of the elevator. I say we send it back to the first floor and kill any that fall through the hole toward us.”
“I’ll second that,” Jericho said.
He pressed the button for the first floor and stepped out of the elevator. He stood back as the elevator descended. The soldiers formed up.
The undead came into view, wandering around on the roof as it lowered. There had to be a dozen of them. They saw the soldiers, hissed, and moved toward them, but the elevator took them down before any of them could stumble through the doorway.
At least that part had been easy.
Z-MINUS: 50 minutes
The comatose patients lay in bed, every bit as unresponsive as the undead, heartrate monitors bleeping their life signal in calm measured tones. They had no idea what was happening to the world, to the center.
“What are we going to do with these people?” Taylor said. “They won’t stand a chance against the undead. They’ll get in here and it’ll be a free-for-all buffet.”
“We’ll make our stand here,” Jericho said. “This is where we’ll hold them back.”
Susan shared a look with Steve, recalling his earlier warning that they wouldn’t be able to hold out against all the undead in the center – and that was before they’d fired their guns, getting the attention of even more undead.
“We’ll set charges and blow the stairwells,” Jericho said.
“That might bring the building down on top of us too,” Taylor said.
“Between the zombies and the building falling on us,” Jericho said. “I’ll take the building. Besides, if we don’t make a stand now to defend these patients, when will we?”
“On the fifth floor,” Susan said.
Her comment gained the attention of everyone present.
“Excuse me?” Jericho said.
“We can’t defend from here,” Susan said. “We have one more floor left, one more barricade. We shouldn’t give that up.”
“These people are your patients,” Jericho said. “You swore an oath to protect them, not to sacrifice them to the infected.”
“He’s right,” Richard said. “We can’t just let them die.”
“Do you think I like doing this?” Susan said. “We have to think about the greater good. These people will buy us time. Who here wants to carry their bodies? It makes us weak and unable to fight. They need their machines to keep them alive. Eventually the power is going to go off anyway, and they will still die. And we would have lost any advantage we might have had.”
“You’re saying we should leave them to their fate?” Jericho said. “Let them get slaughtered like cattle? I won’t do it. You’re not God. You can’t make that decision.”
“It was God who infected all those people out there,” Susan said. “And put us in here, with the only way to make the cure upstairs.”
“We can’t just up and leave them like this!” Richard said. “We swore an oath!”
“Oaths don’t mean much during the apocalypse,” Susan said.
She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. They were cold and dead, not the chipper tone she greeted the soldiers with each morning. She had the cold hard reason of a judge.
“This isn’t an apocalypse!” Phil said. “This is just… a setback, that’s all.”
“The undead walking the streets, the spread of a dangerous virus,” Susan said. “I think it’s a safe assumption to call this the end of days. But there’s still hope. It’s upstairs, and if we can hold out just a little longer…”
“We can’t let those monsters eat these people alive!” Jericho said, betraying a humanity Susan never knew he possessed. He turned to Steve. “Steve, please. We can’t do this.”
Steve opened his mouth to speak, and then turned and looked away.
“Some soldier you are,” Jericho said. “You lost your balls as well as your arm?”
Steve glared at Jericho.
“It takes more balls to do the hard thing,” Steve said. “Susan’s got more balls than the rest of us put together.”
Jericho spat on the floor. The decision had been made, and it hadn’t been in his favor.
“They don’t have to die to those things,” Phil said.
He moved to a cabinet and took out a handful of syringes. Then he went to a cupboard and unlocked it. Inside were rows of various liquids. He went to the end, to a large white jug with an image of a skull and crossbones on it. He set it on a table. He began to fill the syringes.
“Arsenic?” Richard said.
“The king of poisons,” Phil said.
Arsenic, so often the choice of whodunit authors, really was the best poison in the world. It had no taste and worked incredibly fast.
The three scientists each approached a patient. They hesitated. Phil ran a hand through his hair. Susan’s eyes were sunken and desperate. Richard rubbed his sweaty palms over his white coat.
“Are we sure about doing this?” Richard said.
Susan didn’t answer. She felt sick to her stomach. If she did reply she wouldn’t have been able to do it.
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Steve said.
He peered through the furniture at the staircase. The furniture inched backward an inch, and then two.
“They’re coming,” he said.
It gave the scientists the push they needed. They pressed their lips together and inserted the needles into their patients, emptying the poison into their veins. They moved from one patient to the next. As they moved around to the final few patients, the furniture was freely sliding across the floor. The soldiers
pushed against it to keep it in place. Susan administered the final injection and wiped the sweat from her brow.
“Done?” Steve said.
Susan nodded.
“Then it’s time for us to get out of here,” Steve said.
The patients’ heartrate monitors sped up, like a racecar off the start line, until the machines were ringing with a single tone. It was a dagger to the scientists’ hearts. They had worked hard to keep these people alive, so they might one day wake up and see their families and loved ones again. Now, they were to enter a true endless sleep, and it had been at their primary caregivers’ hands.
The room was alive with the monotone death knell. It nipped at the survivors’ heels as they took off up the second set of stairs to the fifth floor. Susan’s icy demeanor faltered and her lips turned down. She’d put them down like unwanted mongrels. It broke her heart, but not enough to make her regret doing it. It was the greater kindness. She was an angel of death, come to bring them solace, to reap their souls, to give them a better farewell than the one they would have received at the hands of the undead.
“Form up around the stairwell,” Steve said. “The final floor. Our last hope.”
“We should barricade the stairs,” Taylor said.
Steve shook his head.
“They’ll hear it,” he said. “For now, we wait.”
“No…” Phil said.
He was looking at something behind them.
“No!” he said, louder.
He got to his feet and ran toward something on the other side of the room. They all turned to see what had so filled Phil with despair.
“No…” Susan said.
“Not now,” Richard said. “Why now?”
Phil was on his knees before Archie. Neither of his arms were working.
Z-MINUS: 28 minutes
Each of Archie’s arms had caught on the petri dish holder, a metal bar that was part of the main chassis. The arms were never meant to come in contact with it, but somehow they’d gotten stuck. They moved back and forth between it and the wall and couldn’t get free.
“When did you last check on him?” Susan said, jumping on a terminal.
“About ten minutes ago,” Phil said.
The arms’ juddering made a high-pitch ringing sound. It was loud, like the alarm bell at school. There were grunts from the fourth floor below.
“You need to shut it up!” Taylor said. “It’s getting their attention!”
Susan turned Archie off, and the piercing sound stopped. Phil used a key to unlock the Plexiglas cage and reached for a petri dish.
“How long will it take to fix it?” Steve said.
“There is no fixing it,” Phil said. “This petri dish is broken.”
“Can’t you just put it back in the machine?” Steve said.
“It’ll be contaminated,” Phil said. “And we’ll have to start over again.”
They were never going to survive that long. Susan’s mouth felt dry.
“What about the other one?” she said.
The undead were making their way up the stairs to the fifth floor, but no one cared. If Archie had failed, they were doomed anyway.
Phil’s footsteps were heavy as he approached Archie’s other arm. He unlocked the case, reached in, and took out the petri dish. A heavy silence as Phil peered at the dish. His expression betrayed nothing. Had everything they’d been fighting for been for nothing? Had Oaks’ death?
“It’s okay,” Phil said. “It’s good.”
He grinned. His eyes shimmered with tears. Everyone’s shoulders relaxed.
“Then we’re still in the game,” Steve said.
“How long till it’s complete?” Richard said.
“Fifteen minutes,” Phil said.
Phil reset Archie’s arm and put the petri dish back in place. He lowered the plastic case.
“Turn him back on,” Phil said.
Susan did. The arm limbered up, checking its joints. Then it returned to its protocol and continued making the cure.
“How much time do we need?” Steve said.
“Fifteen minutes,” Susan said.
Steve turned to look back at the stairwell, the loud grunting and groans from the undead bouncing off the hard concrete walls. Susan could see his thoughts on his face. They didn’t have fifteen minutes.
Z-MINUS: 12 minutes
The soldiers spread out, fully locked and loaded. Steve had a specially-designed assault rifle strapped to his prosthetic, and an ACR tucked in tight to the shoulder of his muscular human arm.
Taylor had a sniper rifle strapped to her missing leg and a pair of pistols in her hands. She was perched beside Archie at the back of the room.
Jericho had a pair of pistols in holsters at his waist and an AK-47 in his hands. For him, reliability was everything.
The scientists had a pistol each. The survivors had dark grey bags under their eyes and a fire in their hearts.
Archie’s right arm was working hard on building the cure, whirring away. Ten minutes remained, and unfortunately it wasn’t going to be peaceful. There was nowhere else for them to run. They had to stay and fight until the cure was ready.
The undead were on the floor below, stumbling around and feeding on the comatose bodies. It was the worst thing Susan had ever listened to. She swore she heard a few groans that sounded like they were from living throats, but she tried to block them out. She’d administered enough Arsenic to each patient for them to die. At the very least they would feel nothing.
But the slurping, snapping sounds of the undead as they fed on the helpless bodies was more than Susan could stomach. She turned away and pressed her hands to her ears. She couldn’t bear to listen to them feeding. They’d been like friends to her, each with their own little quirks and characteristics. Now they were only easy meals for hungry beasts. Susan could see she wasn’t the only one who felt sick.
But the distraction worked. The majority of the undead took their time with the bodies, feeding and getting as much sustenance as they could. The fourth floor was alive with their writhing bodies, their torn rotting flesh beginning to fester and stink up the building.
But other undead were not so easily distracted and made their way up the stairs. They screamed and growled at one another. Susan caught glimpses of their pale angry faces as they pressed against the furniture barricade.
“I have grenades,” Jericho said. “If all else fails, we can still blow them back to hell.”
“We could end up bringing the building down on top of us too,” Steve said.
“He’s right,” Susan said. “It should be a last case scenario.”
“We’re on the final floor with zombies banging on the door,” Jericho said. “How much more last case can it get?”
Steve nodded.
“Do it,” he said. “But only when they’re right on top of us.”
Jericho grumbled under his breath.
“Fine,” he said. “But it’s at my discretion. If I think all hope is lost, then I’m doing it.”
He marched away.
“Do you think we can trust him not to toss them too soon?” Susan said.
“He’ll be fine,” Steve said. “You just concentrate on that machine.”
Zombie arms reached through the barricade, their hands clawed and grabbing at anything they could reach. The soldiers stabbed at them with their knives, killing those in front. The fallen got torn apart by their undead brothers as they surged forward. The furniture splintered and snapped, giving way.
One zombie stumbled from the blockade, reaching out with his hands. Jericho licked his lips and squeezed off a round. The zombie’s head snapped back on his flimsy neck.
“Come on!” he yelled.
The undead responded, bursting through the gaps in the barricade, falling to their knees as often as staying upright. The soldiers let loose a wave of bullets that slammed into the undead bodies, blowing them apart, giving rise to a red mist. Time slowed as the relentless, and seemin
gly endless, horde of undead smashed against the soldiers. An unstoppable force met an immovable object.
Taylor sat crouched over her sniper rifle leg. She fired. The bullet blew through three, sometimes four undead. Nice of them to line up. She swiveled smoothly to her next target. Steve moved with the fluidity of a hunting snake, smooth, taking aim and firing with efficiency and accuracy. Jericho was at the opposite end of the spectrum, shredding the undead to pieces, blowing away limbs if he could.
Finally, Archie’s whirring arm slowed. It folded back into its start position. The dish slid down the little metal lip to be collected. The cure was complete.
“It’s done!” Susan yelled jubilantly.
The soldiers roared, given a fresh burst of energy and hope. They ran forward, screaming at the top of their lungs, bellowing, and blowing away the undead, whose reeking bodies were piling up thick and fast.
“Phil,” Susan said. “Send details of the cure to the other facilities and upload it to the internet.”
“Will do,” Phil said, fingers a blur on the keyboard.
Susan picked up the petri dish. She carried the world’s hopes in her hand. She inserted it into a machine and punched in instructions. The machine whirred and began to do its thing.
“What’s this machine do?” Steve said.
“It produces more of the cure,” Susan said. “Once it’s done, you should take it to wherever the army is gathering. They’ll be able to make more.”
“You’re not coming with us?” Steve said.
“No,” Susan said. “I have to get Amy. She’ll be so scared.”
“I’ll come with you,” Richard said.
Susan was about to argue, but she didn’t get a chance. The undead pushed forward again in large clusters. The soldiers’ bullets slammed into the them, but it took time for the zombies to fall, time they used to push forward, unwittingly using their fallen comrades as shields. The soldiers fell back.
The cure was squirted into a set of a vials. The machine was not meant for industrial production. The zombies attacked the machine, destroying it in moments.