by Duncan, Ian
The music died with the engine, and a character familiar to Trubilinski slid from the seat. He wore jeans and a T-shirt several sizes too small. Sunglasses and an unmarked ball cap concealed what little of his face the beard did not. He reached into the back of the Jeep and lifted out a compact paratrooper’s M240 SAW, carrying it by the handle as casually as one might tote a six-pack of beer.
He mounted the wooden steps and set the machine gun on the porch. He stood with his hands on his hips studying Trubilinski, a bulge of chewing tobacco stretching his cheek. The muscles of his arms were almost ridiculously large for his compact body, as though he were a child’s action figure brought to life.
“How long have you been here?”
“An hour.”
“Who knows you’re here?”
“No one.”
The bearded man nodded his approval and surveyed the yard for a moment before leaning over the rail to spit. He looked back at the general. “Why does it look like an elephant jizzed on your pants?”
Trubilinski squinted in the bright light. “It’s probably best if we don’t talk about it.”
The bearded man finally grinned. “It’s damn good to see you, sir.”
“Good to see you, Sam.” Trubilinski lifted the bottle from the porch beside him and held it up. “Care to toast the end of the world with me?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Sam accepted the bottle and unscrewed the cap.
Trubilinski watched him take a pull. He knew better than to bother offering the former SEAL a glass. “I seem to have dropped my phone in the river. I was hoping you could keep me abreast of the latest news.”
Sam wiped his mouth and shrugged. “Fucked up beyond all belief.”
Trubilinski sipped his bourbon.
Sam stared across the yard. “It’s in Alexandria. As of an hour ago.”
“Inside the Beltway already. Climbers?”
Sam shook his head. “The coughers came first. An outdoor venue of some kind. They started finding climbers after that. Day-old sprouts, sounded like.”
“Washington will be in chaos by tomorrow, then.”
“I’d say a full-on panic is already underway,” Sam said. “You should see the roads.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
Trubilinski nodded. “Good.”
“Alright, sir, clue me what to do. You want to bug out, mark an LZ for a chopper, what?”
Trubilinski sipped his bourbon, then turned the amber fluid in the sunlight. “I’d like to make my way down to Corpus Christi, but I need to destroy something first.”
“I’m your huckleberry,” Sam said, grinning. “We talking diesel fuel and fertilizer? C4? Thermite?”
“No,” Trubilinski said. “Spores.”
Twenty-Eight
COLE AND THE MAN with the axe had only just stepped from the employee break room into the gray light of the grocery store, and Cole was about to follow him through a set of swinging doors to the rear stockroom when they heard the high roar of an engine—a large one—and the thought had just occurred to Cole that the sound was a familiar one, when, at the far end of the aisle nearest them, at the very front of the store, the airlock exploded, and a blunt steel prow, like the brutish nose of some creature from a horror movie, burst through the innermost doors, which dissolved before it as though their tempered glass panes had been no more than sheets of candy.
Glass shards flew through the store like shrapnel and the surprise of it, or the concussion it sent shuddering through the floor, or perhaps the sheer invulnerability of its steel hull, immobilized both men for an instant, in terror and awe, before the engine roared again and the armored vehicle began to back away, disengaging itself from the wreckage of the airlock’s metal framework, and opening at once, Cole realized, a terrible breach in the only levy that stood between those nine survivors and the outside world.
No sooner had the armored vehicle withdrawn than the infected appeared on either side of it, pouring into the opening with the haste and irresistible violence of floodwater only momentarily displaced.
Cole brought the AR up and flicked off the safety. “Get everyone on the roof!” he screamed, and then he began firing—not wildly, but steadily, giving as many of the Cord zombies a bullet, center of body mass, as he could before enough slipped by to flank them, before the real pandemonium ensued. There weren’t enough bullets for them all; not in the whole world, perhaps, but definitely not in Cole’s tactical vest. He swapped out a magazine as rapidly as he could, remembering to jam the empty one into his back pocket.
Cole glanced behind him and saw the man with the axe running with Emily and the other women toward the ladder. Miguel was covering them, AR pistol shouldered, already firing at Cord zombies in the stockroom.
There must have been another entrance to the stockroom, Cole realized, on the other side of the store.
They’d already been flanked.
The teenager came alongside Cole as though stepping up to a firing line, holding the big nine-millimeter with both hands and popping off rounds all too quickly at the coughers charging down the aisle toward them.
Brandon’s revolver thundered like a cannon on Cole’s left, taking aim slowly and deliberately.
Cole was swinging his AR back and forth, snapping shots at coughers that burst from the ends of the aisles right and left without warning.
“THERE’S TOO MANY!” he shouted over the gunfire. “GET TO THE ROOF!”
They kept firing as though they hadn’t heard him.
“FALL BACK!” Cole screamed. Rounds were popping in a staccato torrent in the stockroom behind them, punctuated by a deep-throated roar that could only be the smoker’s double-barreled shotgun.
Cole turned and ran. He slammed through the swinging doors into the stockroom, where opaque panels in the roof provided enough light to avoid running into crates and palletized stacks of boxes. He could see running figures dimly outlined, and, in the far corner, Emily, perhaps fifteen feet in the air, climbing a vertical steel ladder mounted to the wall. Orange balls of fire flashed from the muzzle of the AR pistol in Miguel’s hands and the resounding concussions of the weapon rumbled in the room like an indoor thunderstorm.
The woman with the shotgun had just started up the ladder. A pair of coughers burst through a far set of swinging doors and charged the group, only to fall under Miguel’s covering fire. The man with the axe was standing by with his weapon behind Miguel, crouched and ready. Cole sprinted for them. Miguel saw him coming and swung the AR pistol onto him but thankfully held his fire, apparently recognizing Cole’s profile with the rifle.
Just then Cole heard a loud snap as though the air beside his head had been rent, and he saw a bloom of orange fire coming from the muzzle of the AR pistol in Miguel’s hands.
“DON’T SHOOT!” Cole shouted, holding up the AR in case Miguel hadn’t seen it.
Miguel fired again, and this time Cole realized he was aiming at someone directly behind him. Miguel squeezed off a double-tap and then another, and judging by the tension in the Latino’s crouched posture and the grimace on his face, Cole didn’t dare turn to see what was behind him.
Cole was only ten yards away when the swinging doors flung open and a clot of ten or fifteen coughers stormed them as a monstrous unit, a multi-limbed and multi-headed zombie hydra. Miguel was still taking marks on the far side of the stockroom and didn’t see them soon enough. The man with the axe roared and leapt at them, swinging his axe in a broad swath like a sickle, wiping the head from the shoulders of the first cougher and then cycling the axe wildly, bringing it down again and again in a fit of violence Cole would never be able to forget.
Miguel had stopped firing. Cole saw him looking at the weapon, working frantically to reload. Cole had an instant to regret that he’d only supplied the man with one spare magazine before he spun on his heels and broug
ht the AR up to see, at last, what was behind him.
Six or seven coughers lay heaped in the path Cole had just run between towers of boxes and shrink-wrapped pallets. Staggering down that same aisle now, beset by a gang of coughers pummeling and clawing at him, was a bloodied Brandon, who appeared to be trying his best to flail his attackers with the barrel of his empty revolver.
Cole worked the trigger, quickly dispatching zombies at the edges of the conflagration, working his way closer to Brandon, unable to relieve him entirely for fear of hitting him. Still more coughers were pouring in the door behind them. Cole kept dropping them. Brandon fell to his knees, screaming, and Cole was able to pick off two more coughers that stood over him.
Miguel had reloaded and turned the AR pistol on the group of coughers swarming the man with the axe. Behind Cole came a banshee wail, and the brunette with the meat cleaver ran past him toward Brandon, temporarily blocking his line of fire. Cole backed toward the ladder and looked up. Emily and the woman with the shotgun were near the ceiling, inside a welded safety cage that enclosed the ladder for the highest and most dangerous part of the climb. They didn’t seem to have the access door open yet. Cole grabbed the highest rung of the ladder he could reach. They were all going to die if they didn’t get on that roof.
He pulled himself up, finding the rungs with his boots and climbing awkwardly with the rifle, trying to hold it behind the ladder in an effort to keep himself upright, moving his left hand to the next rung and the next, nearly unable to concentrate on climbing, despite the danger, for the distraction of the gunfire behind him, and the terror that came from turning his back on the battle.
He was in the safety cage now, perhaps fifteen feet off the ground. He looked up the ladder at Emily and the woman with the shotgun, perhaps another ten feet above him. They were sharing the ladder awkwardly, pounding on something with the barrel of the shotgun, ramming it.
“What’s the hold-up?” Cole yelled.
He could barely hear Emily’s voice over the gunfire below. “I can’t get it open!”
“Figure it out!” Cole yelled. The welded framework of the safety cage was large enough that Cole was able to move one boot over to the enclosure and wrap his left arm around one of the vertical bars, taking up a firing position with the barrel of the AR resting on a horizontal brace. He began firing almost immediately. Cord zombies seemed to fill most of the stockroom by now; dozens lay prostrate on the floor, and scores more were clotted together in writhing heaps that Cole feared were the very places where some of the survivors had made their last stand. There was no sign of the man with the axe or the brunette with the cleaver. Somehow Brandon had survived and Miguel was pushing him up the ladder with one hand and shooting with the other, blasting coughers in the face as they charged him.
Cole started raining down death from above, defending a perimeter around Miguel, who had already begun climbing up after Brandon. By the time Brandon reached Cole, he had reloaded the AR once and then transitioned to the Glock. Miguel had apparently run the AR pistol dry. He had climbed high enough behind Brandon to stomp coughers in the face as they reached for his feet, and Cole was firing almost directly beneath them now, just trying to buy seconds, and already so many coughers lay dead or stunned below them Cole had reason to worry the growing pile of bodies would eventually reach them on the ladder—if he didn’t run out of ammunition first.
Behind Cole, Brandon cried out in pain. Cole turned his head in time to see a broken padlock falling from his head where it had struck his scalp, already bloodied from his fight with the coughers. His face was so swollen and streaked Cole could barely recognize him.
“WE GOT IT!” came a voice from above.
Cole felt air rush over him and looked up to see a small square of pink sky open in the roof. Emily and the woman with the shotgun climbed onto the roof and turned to look back, their heads appearing in silhouette.
Cole stood to the side on the framework of the safety cage and let Brandon climb past him, so unsteadily and painfully that Cole was amazed he was able to make it.
“GO, GO, GO!” Cole shouted.
Miguel stayed on Brandon’s heels, clenching the AR pistol’s grip in his teeth.
Three coughers had already started up the ladder behind them.
Cole turned the Glock on the first, holding the sights on the man’s head. His eyes were bloodshot and his teeth bared, his chin slicked with phlegm, his chest heaving like a bellows to expel spores. It wasn’t a difficult shot. The cougher’s body fell away, but didn’t knock the other two from the ladder as Cole had hoped. The recoil had felt hard in Cole’s hand and he realized the balance of the pistol had changed. He looked at it. The slide was locked back. He was out.
Cole holstered the empty Glock in his vest and worked the AR much like a toilet plunger, smashing the first cougher in the head with the butt of the rifle, and then hammering her fingers when she still didn’t let go of the steel rung, again and again, until, at last, she fell, only to be replaced by the next, and the next. An entire mob of coughers waited at the base of the ladder now, all reaching excitedly for him, coughing and leaping up, though he was at least ten feet above their outstretched fingers. They did not seem at all discouraged by the bodies that fell, occasionally flattening one of their number with the muffled shattering of bones. They knew nothing but appetite—appetite and rage.
“Cole, come on!”
Emily’s voice.
Cole looked up. The ladder was finally clear. The moment he started climbing, the Cord zombies started gaining on him from below, unchallenged. Only six more feet. Cole could feel them on the ladder. He could feel the rungs ringing with the vibration of their climbing. He made the mistake of looking down and nearly lost his cool. The ladder was full of them, as though the crowd below were a single mass extending itself upward, a single hand grasping for his ankles.
He felt a cougher below him now, clawing at his legs. He kicked it away, but it belonged to a younger man, faster, and unhindered by a rifle, as Cole was. He was determined not to lose the weapon, not now, not when he still had loose ammunition in his pack to load the empty magazines. He stopped and held on with his left hand, yelling with a rage all his own and stomping the cougher’s face repeatedly. The cougher’s head fell back, its nose broken and gushing, but still the hands did not let go. Too many bars and cross braces offered a good grip now that they were inside the enclosure of the safety cage; even if Cole kicked the cougher loose, the pressure of the others coming up from below may very well continue to propel him upwards.
Cole looked up just as the hand closed over his ankle again. He was nearly close enough to pass the AR, barrel first, to Emily.
“Take it!” he yelled.
Emily’s outstretched hand hung as low as she could reach from the hatch. “A bit further!”
Cole was being pulled almost irresistibly from below. He nearly lost his grip. He cursed the cougher and stomped him with his boot heel until the man’s eyes rolled back in his head and his fingers relaxed. His body fell back against the safety cage, but did not fall. Cole could see the head of another cougher below, knuckles white on the rungs, pushing past him.
Cole gained another rung and pushed the AR upwards. He felt it lifted from him. He had both hands on the rungs now. Two more to go. Hands were anxiously reaching for him from above and below now. All he had to do, with the last remaining strength he had, was elude the grasp of those below long enough to pass himself, willingly, into the grip of those above.
Cole was pulled over the edge of the hatch and dropped onto the rubber membrane of the rooftop. He lay stunned as Emily fired round after round down into the opening with her big Sig Sauer, hot shell casings flipping onto Cole, and then she withdrew and Miguel and the woman with the shotgun slammed the hinged lid shut and flung themselves over top it, holding it down with their own weight while, beneath them, the lid shook and vibrated from the upw
elling pressure of the horde.
The survivors looked at each other, shell-shocked. Emily added her weight to the hatch and Miguel pulled a small crucifix on a chain out of his shirt and kissed it. Brandon lay moaning on the rooftop only feet from Cole. The woman with the shotgun opened the breach and flicked out two empty shells. Emily had begun to cry and Miguel was saying something in Spanish that Cole was too light-headed to interpret.
The rooftop was a barren wasteland all of white, populated only by hulking air-conditioning units and vent stacks. Perhaps a football field’s length away, along the low parapet wall of the far edge, Cole glimpsed slender rising silhouettes at once familiar and too strange now to register in his exhausted mind. He let his head fall back and gazed into the sky, his eyes straining to focus on a small black dot high overhead.
It was only a floater in his field of vision, or so he thought. The dot seemed to grow larger, then smaller again, as one might see an object through the lens of an automatic camera struggling to focus. But it was not the weakness of his eye that caused the phenomenon, Cole realized. High altitude clouds lit crimson by the setting sun were sharp enough in his vision. It was the object itself growing larger and smaller, rising and falling, hovering in an unstable pocket of air.
It was the drone.
Just then Cole heard a musical ding. It was a sound effect from another world, a world of relative innocence, leisure, and mindless notifications.
The woman with the shotgun drew a slim smartphone from her hip pocket and looked at its screen, her eyes wide with surprise.
“Y’all aren’t going to believe this,” she said, the raspy voice behind her dust mask laden with awe. “A new episode just dropped.”
Twenty-Nine
DARKNESS FELL by the time they found a way to secure the hatch, Miguel discovering steel hasps on either side by which it could be locked, and then a scavenger hunt ensued by the woman with the shotgun—whose name was Trudy, it turned out—for something on the rooftop to use in lieu of a padlock: a loose bolt or a rod of some kind. She found, at last, beneath one of the air handlers, a short length of discarded copper refrigerant coil, and then Brandon, propped up painfully on one elbow, produced, from his pant’s pocket, a worn aluminum carabineer attached to his car keys.