Now, Stu gave the metal beast a familiar rap with his knuckles as he moved around it and made his way to the door. Above him, set into that low ceiling, were a number of pipes or ducts that had once routed the heated air to the rest of the prison. Only one registered on the scope and Stu guessed that it led, by a long and convoluted route, to the kitchens which were still in use.
Just enough heat was conducted along that pipe to guide him through the lowest level of the prison. It didn’t stop him from knocking into unseen walls and banging into half-open doors. In the dark, he missed a jumbled pile of junk that Gerry had moved down from the prison offices a few months before.
It had been a quick and sloppy job. The unwilling workers had not wanted to linger in the scariest place in the entire prison. They had hurriedly left a metal cabinet stacked like a Jenga piece on a desk. When Stu brushed against it with his hurt arm, he winced from both the pain and, when it fell, from the colossal THROOOM! that echoed throughout the entire prison, filling up every cranny of it. The Corsairs above him began to yell back and forth to each other; the cries sifted downward along with a fine, soft dust.
“Damn,” he growled and tried to hurry through the jumble, but the darkness seemed to have magnified his dizziness and he wobbled from side to side, knocking into more precariously balanced items. The noise was horrendous and by the time Stu made it to the spiral staircase that led to the main area where the prisoners were once housed in their cold cells, his teeth were so completely clenched together that his jaw ached.
He needed a moment to right his head and another to catch his breath. He was tired and weak, which was no way to face the Corsairs who were waiting for him. They would have twenty guns trained on the single door.
They wouldn’t be able to miss even if it was a dark door. The smoke bombs would help, but Stu did not expect to live. Blood from the wound in his calf had collected in his right boot and it squished as he walked. More blood washed down his back, and the nick under his left arm made his hand slippery as well as numb.
He took two long breaths and pushed up the spiral stairs, going round and round, leaning on the rail. Without it, he wouldn’t have made it three steps. The stairs were a trial. They were an arduous moment to moment marathon where he had to will his dying body on, where the desire to stop was perfectly balanced by the knowledge that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to get back up again.
Barely conscious, he made it to the iron door that opened into the main cellblock. He looked at it with perhaps the last of his disappointment. It was closed.
“Damn,” he whispered. The door had emitted a sly creak on his first expedition into the dungeons ten years before. Since then the creak had grown to a squeal and that had become a screech. Now, heaving the door open, it was the scream of an animal being torn to pieces.
He was still in mid-push when someone fired a gun. Brraaaang! The bullet pounded against the door, partially deafening him. More bullets followed the first and he went to drop down and duck back into the stairwell, however his knees simply buckled and he fell on his ass as the bullets began to skip and bounce around him, making musical tings and zings.
One of those tings also shot away the webbing between his left thumb and pointer finger. The pain was sharp agony at first, then the numbness came back worse than before and now had spread to his shoulder. What would it be like when it spread to my heart? he wondered as he shook the pack from his back.
He knew the answer and it only elicited a shrug, since he didn’t think he would make it that long, especially since he could barely hold the bloody smoke bomb as he lit it. His strength gave out when he threw the bomb, which went all of ten feet into the cellblock where it began to sizzle and hiss.
The block was three levels of shoulder to shoulder, open-to-the-world cells. There were few hiding places and the Corsairs had to rely on the midnight darkness pervading the building. The prison was normally eerie and had unnerved stronger men than Stu, but just then, when he glanced into the block just before the smoke filled the central corridor, it seemed like it was filled with out of season fireflies.
Of course the fireflies were accompanied by ear-rending explosions that reverberated along the old metal bars.
Stu sat back as the bullets began to spray wildly, thoroughly piercing the smoke at every level and from one side to the other. With no point of reference to aim at, the Corsairs rattled away for a good minute.
It wasn’t until the smoke had filled the corridor between the cells and the gunfire began to slacken that Stu pushed himself, shakily to his feet and maneuvered into the cell block. As best as he could tell, there was a platoon-sized element arrayed all along the far side of the block, some on the second level, a few on the third, but the greatest number down below with him.
While still within the smoke of the first, he lit his last bomb and lobbed it underhand to the second level of cells. As quickly as he could, he ducked into one of the cells as a new barrage erupted.
“Waste your bullets all you want,” he muttered, bringing his rifle to his shoulder and switching on the scope. He could see the Corsairs perfectly. There were nineteen of them and they were just as blind as could be. As he had only one good arm, Stu used the bars of the cage as a tripod, lined up a shot and killed a man forty yards away on the third level.
It was with great satisfaction that he watched him fall with a skull-shattering thud. His satisfaction died in the next instant as the thermal scope went black—its batteries were dead and now Stu was as blind as the eighteen men trying to kill him.
Chapter 27
Mike Gunter
The undulating wall of smoke separating the tip of Alcatraz from what felt like the rest of the world stretched up into the night sky in something of a bow. It leaned over Mike and Colleen, looking as though it might come crashing down on them like a wave.
Although the wave itself would be harmlessly insubstantial, Mike felt a momentary fear over what it hid. How many Corsairs were lurking in there, waiting for him to go blundering in before springing a trap? How many zombies were stalking through the smoke, ready to tear apart anyone foolish enough to take one step through that wall?
Mike’s was a momentary hesitation, a hiccup in the courage he’d shown and after a sheepish grunt of embarrassed laughter, he stepped into that wall of smoke, ready to face what dangers lay hidden inside. Colleen’s hiccup was of a much more prolonged sort and before Mike could take a second step into the smoke, she rushed forward and grabbed his hand.
“Wait,” she whispered, pulling him back. “Hold on.”
“Why?” he asked in his raspy voice. She was afraid, but of what? Had she heard something? Had she spotted a zombie plowing through the smoke?
She sputtered, “B-Because. W-We should w-wait, you know? Just give it a moment.”
Now he understood; her fear had gotten the best of her. “It’ll be okay,” he said and pulled his hand from hers. Once more he started in, and once more she rushed forward to grab him, this time she didn’t settle for just his hand, she clung to his entire left arm.
It was a stupid way to enter a potentially dangerous situation, however her nails digging into his coat let him know that she wasn’t going to be easily pried away. He let out a growl of irritated resignation and stepped into the smoke.
Immediately, his world shrank. Only inches from his own, Colleen’s pale face grew misty and insubstantial. It seemed to float in the smoke, bodiless, while at the same time, her grip became far more urgent. Mike should have made some sort of attempt to loosen her grip, considering that they might have been seconds from a fight. He didn’t, however.
The smoke had an eerie ethereal quality that made it seem as though they were crossing through some sort of alien barrier and they would no longer be on Alcatraz Island and maybe no longer on earth when they reached the other side. With frightening campfire stories stirring up his imagination, he was grateful for Colleen’s presence and the reality she represented.
The two clu
ng to each other and groped forward until they came to a wall that Mike simply did not recognize and could not explain. It was made up of strange black bricks and he knew there were no black bricked buildings on the island.
Tentatively, he touched the wall, a part of him thinking that his finger might pass through it as though it were only a projection. It was real and perfectly hard, but still made no sense. With anxiety escalating into outright fear, he felt along the wall until it cut sharply at a corner and went off into the smoke. Mike pulled his hand back, curling in his fingers in case the smoke also hid things that might find them tasty.
It was an easy decision not to follow the unknown wall to its unknown destination and the two shuffled along until they came to the edge of a crumbling rocky slope. The island was made up of one rocky slope after another, but this was no ordinary slope. From his constricted perspective and with his imagination churning out all sorts of insane possibilities, it seemed as if they had found themselves at the lowest fringe of a mountain.
Mike had the sense that it rose higher and higher, that it towered over them many hundreds of feet over their heads.
“W-What is this?” Colleen asked in a rattled whisper. “This isn’t right.” Her grip became so fierce that Mike could feel her nails pinch through his jacket.
“Don’t worry. We’re almost through the smoke,” he told her, though this also didn’t feel correct. The smoke felt as endless as the towering mountain.
She started to reply but let out a startled, strangled cry as she tripped on something that hid under the smoke. “It grabbed me!” she hissed, clinging to him with desperate strength. “There’s something alive in here with us.”
For the first time in his life, Mike hoped there was a zombie nearby. He pointed his M4 into the smoke and swished it back and forth with his finger all over the trigger. He quite honestly would have shot anything that appeared.
“We have to get out of here!” Colleen said, directly into his ear. “We have to go back.” Her taloned hands were now yanking him.
There was an amazing difference in the psychological makeup of Mike Gunter on land versus Mike on board a boat. Captaining a flimsy sailboat through dense smoke, towards a rocky, zombie-infested shore, with people shooting at him had been far, far more dangerous than kicking around in the dark on an island he had grown up on, and yet he was nearly wetting himself and didn’t say a word as Colleen dragged him in the direction she thought of as “back.”
It turned out she had no idea which way back or front was, and as the two hurried through the smoke Mike smashed into something that grabbed his rifle, holding it by the front sight. Panic surged and he shot out a hand to get a point of reference so he could empty his magazine into the creature, only his hand came up against something hard like metal, but very thin and with holes—it was a fence. Better yet, it was a waist-level fence and there was only one on the island. Suddenly, he knew exactly where he was!
Despite the pain in his throat, he let out a gushing laugh of relief as he ran his hand all along the chain links. “I know where we are. This is the fence that runs right under the water tower,” he told Colleen, directing her shaking hands so she could feel the marvelous fence. He then reached down and patted the ground beneath them, which was, as expected, a gritty, sand-covered sidewalk.
“Oh, yes,” he said, in triumph. “This is the way.” He pulled her along, making sure to keep one hand on the fence; it was his one perfect link to reality and it led him, out of the smoke after a mere thirty steps.
As if they had suffered some long, arduous ordeal, Colleen flung herself on him and hung on his shoulder in weak relief. Mike felt something similar, however his relief did not last. There above them was the great grey prison sitting on the very highest tier on the island.
The dark building was quiet and had a tangibly dead feeling to it.
Mike and Colleen shared a look and she asked the obvious: “What happened? Where is everyone?” The island was strangely silent. Only minutes before it had sounded as though a hundred guns had been going off all at once. Now there was only haunting silence.
“I have no idea,” Mike replied as he put his rifle to his shoulder and used the low-light scope to look for some clue as to what was going on. The sight was clearer than expected; the huge smoke bombs that he and Stu had released near the island had drifted on the current past the dock and were now spewing smoke over an empty bay.
The sight might have been clear, it not reassuring, however. The Tempest, looking as though its hull was made of sagging cardboard, was aground on the rocks below where the guard tower had once stood. The tower was now a strange shamble of bent steel siding and long, spider-like legs jutting outward toward the bay.
And there were bodies strewn everywhere, including a large pile of them near the front entrance of the prison. But who were they? Were they Corsairs or were they part of Stu’s crew? And was Stu among them? Mike didn’t think so. Stu was too tough to die, and besides there was a cloud of smoke rising near one of the walls. It was from one of the smaller smoke bombs that Stu had carried. He’d gotten that far at least.
Shrugging off his earlier fear, Mike began hurrying toward the prison. “We have to have to get up there as fast as we can.”
The only formal path up the side of the rocky base of the prison was a zigzagging sidewalk that ran back and forth right in front of the walls. Taking it was a sure way to get shot; it was also the slowest way to get to the prison. The quickest way was to scramble up more of the rocky slopes they’d run into earlier.
Mike had been raised on the island and he went up the closest of the rough, rocky inclines with little more trouble than a billy-goat might have, which is to say none at all. Colleen tried with all the dexterity and climbing ability of a jellyfish: she ran to the wall of rock, made a leap and clung there uselessly, two feet off the ground.
“Son of…” His wounded throat kept him from cursing any more than that, although he had an entire train of expletives lined up, one after the other. He pulled his rifle from his back, unloaded it and held the butt out for her to take. She was not entirely helpless and she was able to grip the weapon well enough to be lifted to his level.
At the next slope, he boosted her to a point where the handholds were so obvious that he figured even a novice like Colleen would have no trouble. A second later, she slipped and piled into him. They both went to the ground, he with a sharp, lancing pain in his throat, her with an embarrassed smile and a high rose color to her cheeks—she had managed to end up on top of him, their noses touching softly.
“Are you alright?” she asked. Her breath smelled of mint and her long neck of perfume. She was light and he could have lifted her off of him with ease, and yet he hesitated, though for the life of him he couldn’t understand why he didn’t. When he didn’t immediately lift her off, she asked, “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
That didn’t seem possible. She was as delicate as a flower and as slender as a…
A muffled scream from within the prison jerked him quickly back. It was followed by new explosions of gunfire, but it was the scream which had Mike moving.
It had sounded like a woman’s scream. “Or a girl’s,” he said, under his breath. Suddenly his pain and exhaustion disappeared as he pictured Jenn’s face. There was no way she could be in the prison—no way, except she had been left with Jillybean. Time and again, Jillybean had managed to destroy the very concept of impossibility.
He pulled out of Colleen’s now soft grip and jumped to his feet. “Meet me inside!” He raced away while she was still trying to get up. Without Colleen slowing him down, Mike went right up the side of the steep hill, ran along the wall heedless of any danger, and entered the prison next to a cave-like room where the prisoners once got their bowl haircuts.
Although the prison was dark as a tomb, his Starlight scope gave him a perfect view of the first level of D Block, which was empty. He sped past thirty open cells to the corridor that led into the center of the
prison. C Block was also deserted, but when he came to B Block he saw three people shooting from the corner, aiming at something in the next block of cells.
Up came the scope, which gave him generalities only—they were bearded men, firing a combination of guns. But were they Corsairs? With just a glowing outline, he couldn’t tell and he couldn’t risk shooting his own people. He had to get closer.
At fifteen feet their identities firmed up: they smelled of old sweat and they cursed extensively. Most likely they were Corsairs, but he had to get closer still to make sure. Mike slipped up to within seven feet, when one of them unleashed a long burst with an AK-47. In the glare of the light, he caught sight of the blue lines of a tattoo across his forehead.
Now Mike knew they were Corsairs, and he fired into the men at point blank range, killing two outright and wounding the third so badly that he fell face first and began coughing blood.
Mike kicked away his weapon and took his place at the corner where he peered through his scope. “Jeeze,” he whispered, when he saw Corsairs ringing the smoke-filled cellblock. He had no idea who they were shooting at.
Where was Jenn, or whoever had screamed? It had been a woman he knew that. He scanned the few dead bodies and the Corsairs a second time. They were firing a horrendous number of bullets into the smoke. If Stu was still alive, he wouldn’t be for much longer.
“Jeeze-louise,” Mike moaned, using the curse he kept in reserve for the worst situations, and this one was dire. So dire that he couldn’t take his time and play the part of hidden sniper, making kills using precision and stealth.
GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3 Page 106