by Duncan, Ian
Emily waved her hand excitedly as though fanning herself. Her voice was muffled by her mask.
“I can’t understand you!” Cole shouted.
She lifted the mask away from her face long enough to blurt out, “The black cable—the plastic part is rubbing off!”
“Shit.” Too late, Cole realized he should have rigged something to protect the cable as it slid over the abrasive edge of the masonry wall. Still, there were five cords in the bundle that made up the cable. Even if one snapped…
“Keep going!” came Brandon’s voice.
Cole kept letting it slip forward. He watched the pipe. It was happening almost imperceptibly, but he began to realize that every time the cable slid around the vent pipe it rode a little higher, and the higher it rode, the more leverage the cable gained in bending the pipe.
“He’s not quite halfway!” Emily called out.
Cole began to understand the forces at work when he glanced at the height of the parapet wall and compared it to the vent pipe. Under pressure, the cable wanted to rise to the same height as the wall, but the vent pipe was fully a foot shorter. His ability to visualize it was only a brief step ahead of what was happening in real time. The pipe leaned even further and the cable slipped up, at least two inches this time. The process was accelerating.
Cole tried to let the cable out faster, but that only moved the cable even higher on the pipe.
“Emily!” Cole had noticed something else. Emily was standing on the wrong side of the cable. If the pipe gave and the cable whipped across that space it would throw her against the parapet wall, or possibly even knock her over it. “Emily! Get down!”
The pipe was going, bending steadily now. The tipping point was coming.
Emily looked at him, not comprehending what he meant.
“Get under the cable! Get to the other side!”
“I can’t stop it! Shit!”
Emily dropped to all fours on the rooftop just as the cable popped off the top of the PVC pipe, snapping like a bowline. Cole fell backward, all the tension released and the line coming across the rooftop, vibrating like a plucked string as it ran over the edge of the wall and went tight again.
“No no no no no!” Cole grabbed madly for the cable. From a nearly prone position he planted his feet, but when the line snapped taut there was no stopping it. It both dragged him across the roof and burned through the palms of his hands. Still, he refused to let go. Pain came like fire in the palms of his hands.
Below, he heard Brandon scream.
Cole struck the parapet wall with both feet, hard. The momentum of the cable pulled him to his feet and for an instant he thought he would be pulled over the edge of the wall, but then, just as suddenly as it had all happened, the tension went out of the line.
Brandon had already hit the ground.
Forty-Two
COLE LOOKED DOWN from the parapet wall to see Brandon sprawled flat on the ground thirty feet below. Chloe bent over him.
“BRANDON!” Cole yelled.
“Oh my god,” Emily said, coming to Cole’s side. “Is he okay?”
“BRANDON!”
Brandon started to move.
“I think I’m okay,” they heard him say in a faint voice. “Didn’t hit that hard, just knocked the breath out of me.”
Cole felt weak all over. He reached for his head with both hands, then jerked them away when he felt the pain. He looked at his hands. His palms and fingers were raw and bleeding. He slumped against the parapet wall. He could feel the adrenaline leaving him, departing from him like an empowering spirit. For some reason it made him want to smoke a cigarette and eat an entire chocolate cake—simultaneously, if possible.
“That could’ve killed him,” Cole said, shaking his head and swearing.
Emily’s squeezed his arm. “You’re doing everything you can.”
Cole shook his head. “I’m not trying that with you.”
“Guys, we got company down here!”
When Cole rose and looked over the parapet wall, he saw three figures standing at the far corner of the strip mall. Even from that distance, he noticed the slump of their shoulders. The lifeless way their arms hung.
“Get in the van!” Cole shouted. “Chloe! Get Brandon in the fucking van!”
Cole reached for the cable, only to realize he couldn’t lower himself again even if he wanted, nor could he leave Emily stranded on the rooftop.
Brandon looked up as Chloe hooked her arm under his and lifted him.
“We’ll have to find another way down!” Cole yelled. “Meet us around back at the docks!”
Cole could see Chloe looking up. “At the docks! Meet us at the loading docks!” he shouted again.
Chloe got Brandon’s arm around her neck and steered him toward the open door of the van. One of the figures at the corner started forward, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. Managers, Cole thought. Scouting for the horde.
The sound of pounding feet carried across the pavement even before they came into view. Chloe shoved Brandon into the van and ran around to the driver’s side.
“The rifle!” Cole screamed.
Chloe dashed for it and turned back to the van just as the horde came into view. They were hundreds strong—maybe a thousand. Chloe slung the tactical vest and backpack into the van, then hesitated, shouldering the rifle as though she intended to make a stand. She sighted down the barrel but didn’t fire, then looked at the rifle.
“It’s the damn safety,” Cole muttered. “Go!” he shouted. “Just fucking go!”
Chloe tossed the rifle through the open driver’s door and jumped into the seat, cranking the ignition and chirping the tires as the van leapt forward—nearly at the same instant the wave of Cord zombies reached them, coughing against the windows and grabbing at the rear of the van with hands become claws.
The van slipped through their midst and accelerated, several coughers that had managed to find purchase on the luggage rack and rear windshield wiper tumbling away and somersaulting across the pavement.
“Cole, look!” Emily pointed. One of the managers on the pavement below had stopped to stare up at them. His gaze was calm and impassive as a reptile, not even fully turning his head to regard them.
“Managers,” Cole said in a low voice.
“Can they get up here? Can they climb the cable?”
“Let’s not find out.” Cole reached for the cable and gripped it gingerly in his hand. An instant later it jerked taut. Cole winced and tried to hold on. When he peered over the edge he saw that another of the managers, a man with disheveled red hair, had taken hold of it and was gazing intently upward.
It was no use fighting. The manager easily hung by all his weight, while Cole could barely command his burned hands to grip at all. He dropped the cable, ran to the air handler, and started prying at the knot with his fingers. It had tightened considerably under tension.
“Watch him!” Cole called over his shoulder. “You got your pistol?”
When Cole looked up from the knot, Emily had the big Sig Sauer in her hand, waiting at the top of the cable, looking over the parapet wall, watching the manager’s progress.
The stiff plastic coaxial cable resisted Cole’s fingers. He tried teasing out the individual cords that made up the cable, but he badly needed a screwdriver or knife to pry them apart and loosen the knot. He kept glancing back at Emily.
“What’s going on?” he asked anxiously.
“He’s climbing,” Emily said—almost too calmly, Cole thought.
Cole’s fingers were useless. “Damn it all to hell.”
“Another one’s coming up behind him now!” Emily shouted.
Cole had an idea. “Shoot them now!”
Emily glanced back at him.
“Go ahead, it’s the only way to get tension off the line!”
/> She braced her forearms against the edge of the parapet wall and aimed down the cable. A second later Cole heard the pistol report and saw the brass shell flipping through the sunlight.
Cole tried the cable. It was loose. He wasted no time lifting it up and over the edge of the air handler, tossing up one side and then going to the next corner to push that side over the edge as well. Before he could come around to Emily’s side again, tugging from below jerked the loop off the top of the air handler and dragged it across the roof to the parapet wall. Emily watched the knotted end slide over the edge and out of sight.
Cole indulged in one more glimpse at the chaos below. The red-headed manager lay motionless on a pile of several other coughers killed by his impact. All around them, a continual procession of coughers streamed in the direction the minivan had gone, choking and coughing and staggering. It looked as though the whole city’s population had succumbed.
“There’s only one way down now,” Cole said.
Emily only stared at the coughers. Cole was surprised to see tears in her eyes.
“How long can they live like that?” she asked.
Cole shook his head. “Until the Cord suffocates them. A few days, maybe.”
“Why can’t we just hole up somewhere for a few days, then?”
“That won’t be the end of them,” Cole said. “They’ll keep finding more pockets of survivors and the cycle will keep on repeating. It’s how the Cord reproduces.”
“What happens when there’s no one left?”
“No one left to infect?”
Emily nodded.
“The spores lie dormant then,” Cole said. “For seven years, I heard once.”
For a minute Cole and Emily stood looking out over that river of ruined human flesh, until at last Cole reached for her hand and pulled her away from the spectacle. It could do neither of them any good.
Forty-Three
“HERE, CORDY, CORDY,” Sam said. He gripped the silenced carbine and peered around the fifth corner he and Cuban had rounded on foot since leaving the relative security of Trubilinski’s Excursion.
“What do you see?” Cuban asked hoarsely, watching him.
Sam looked back slowly, his eyes wide with terror. “Your mom!” he whispered.
Cuban’s eyes went wide. “Shit, is she a zombie?”
Sam looked back and shook his head. “It’s always been so hard to tell.”
“Burning daylight here,” came Wes’s voice in their earpieces.
Both operators’ shoulders slumped with boredom. They rounded the corner and struck out across an open plaza paved with brick. Here and there cast iron tables and chairs were set up to serve as lunch spots for the office personnel that worked in the high rise buildings above. It already appeared as though a horde had passed through the corridor. Litter of all kinds lay underfoot: plastic bags and food wrappers, luggage, open briefcases, wadded bed clothes, a child’s Pooh bear.
“We suck at finding zombies, that’s all there is to it,” Sam complained, kicking his way through it.
Cuban turned, panning his rifle slowly over their surroundings. “Definitely too much like Army shit. ‘You and you, mount a patrol. Close with the enemy.’”
“Engage, then run like hell,” Sam said, continuing the parody.
The former SEALs’ desultory manner actually belied the nerves they felt serving as live bait for a horde of coughers. It was a decidedly simple mission, but one unlike any they’d ever had—a rare thing for men of their experience. The pair fell into a natural rhythm without needing to delineate individual responsibilities. They kept their backs roughly toward one another, moving slowly and warily, each watching his own field of fire.
The care they had taken made it even more of a shock, then, when Sam saw the man standing there, stock still, not fifty yards away.
He froze. “Cuban,” he said in a low voice, devoid of any shenanigans. “Two o’ clock.”
Cuban pivoted slowly on the ball of his boot sole, the only sound the dry grit turning there.
For a moment they only stared, a standoff much like an encounter in the woods with a bear. It was a young man, fair-skinned and slightly built, wearing dark clothes. He regarded them with his chin down and his dark eyes hard on them, unblinking. On any normal human face, it would have been a glare of defiance and deviant mischief. Perhaps it still was.
Sam held his weapon and watched the man intently, waiting for a cough or some telltale sign of infection.
“It’s just one dude,” Cuban finally observed.
Trubilinski’s voice crackled in their earpieces. The Excursion was nearly out of range. “What are you seeing? Talk to me.”
“One possible tango,” Sam said. “No sign of the horde.”
In a sudden flutter of movement that brought both operators’ guns up, the man whirled and ran, perhaps a hundred feet before he turned a corner and disappeared.
Their weapons went slack and they breathed easy again.
“He’s gone,” Sam said. “Just some fucktard out for a stroll at the end of the world.”
“Watch yourselves,” came Trubilinski’s voice. “That could have been a manager.”
“Meaning?” Cuban started.
Sam held up his hand, silencing him. He knelt slowly and laid the flat of his hand on a brick paver. He’d grown up near a railroad corridor in eastern Kentucky and this was exactly the kind of subtle vibration he’d learned to recognize walking the rails as a boy. He looked up at Cuban, his eyes widening. They both turned to look at the same time.
Coming down the corridor between office buildings was a crowd too dense to estimate. They were legion and they were angry, the Cord zombies at the front of the horde seeming to lead the pack with spastic wind-milling motions of their arms. The sound of coughing and the stamping of feet filled the plaza.
Sam and Cuban took several involuntary steps backwards.
“What’s happening?” came Trubilinski’s voice.
“We, uh, we have the horde,” Sam managed. “Shit,” he said, looking at Cuban. “Run!”
They ran at a breakneck pace back over the ground they’d just covered, their feet flying and weapons pumping side to side in their hands. Sam wished now that he’d stripped down to no more than running shoes. He was suffocating in the respirator, black spots appearing in his vision. He reached up and ripped it from his face, gulping the air, spores be damned.
Sam edged ahead of Cuban and managed to cast a sideways grin at him, egging him on. Cuban rolled his eyes. The coughers leading the pack weren’t far behind—less than one hundred feet—and running even faster now with their prey in sight. One slip-up, one ankle turned in the debris and the two operators would be dead men.
Barely a half-mile away, the Excursion was waiting, rear passenger doors open and the engine running. There had been no further sign of activity outside the warehouse where the traffickers had stashed their victims.
“Here they come!” Wes shouted, looking back through the rear window.
The two operators appeared first, running flat out, and then, behind them, a mass of humanity swept into view with an almost fluid quality, like a tidal wave sloshing around the corners of city streets.
“Alright boys,” Trubilinski said, watching in the rearview mirror. “Give yourselves as much of a lead as you can.”
“Give me odds,” came Sam’s breathless voice over the coms.
“Two to one, Cuban,” said Wes.
“Just saying that to piss me off,” Sam managed.
“I surely am,” Wes admitted.
The two operators stretched their legs out and pounded the pavement, running nearly shoulder to shoulder, as they had once been accustomed to do on training runs on the beach. A thousand feet and closing. By the time they hit the open doors of the Excursion—nearly simultaneously—they had increased their
lead to three hundred feet.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Wes said, as the two scrambled, breathless, into the cab and Trubilinski flattened the accelerator, not waiting for the doors to close.
“Brace for impact!” Wes called out.
Sam and Cuban pulled at the shoulder belts and fastened themselves to the backseat, laying their weapons in the floorboard and stepping on them before they stiff-armed the captain’s chairs in front of them and watched the big roll-up door of the warehouse looming closer and closer.
“Don’t over-penetrate!” Cuban shouted, when he saw the speedometer climbing above sixty. “We’ll need to back out quick!”
“That’s what she said!” Sam shouted.
Even Trubilinski laughed, stepping on the brakes at the last second, regaining control just as the Excursion’s brush guard folded up the sheet metal door as though it were no more than a curtain of aluminum foil.
They were inside. Air bags exploded all around them, though the impact had been minimal. Trubilinski batted his airbag aside and slammed the gearshift into reverse. For a moment, all they could see outside the Excursion was a cloud of dust swirling in the dim light of the warehouse, and then the traffickers opened fire.
Bullet holes appeared in a constellation across the windshield.
Trubilinski mashed the accelerator, the tires smoking on polished concrete before they caught and launched the SUV backwards, out into daylight. Trubilinski turned the wheel and whipped the Excursion out of the way in a backwards J-turn just as the horde surged forward, breaking against the warehouse in a human wave. The thunder of gunfire from the warehouse was constant now, a desperate attempt to ward off their attackers.
Coughers thudded against the Excursion, the crushing press of a thousand Cord zombies moving even the heavy SUV sideways across the pavement. The airbags were beginning to deflate, giving them the full view of a horde that seemed endless.
“There’s too many!” Wes yelled.
They—the three operators, at least—had invoked a thing they did not comprehend. Trubilinski shifted the Excursion into drive and stomped the gas, plowing the heavy brush guard through the onrushing coughers. Despite bodies under the tires, rocking the truck on its suspension, and the heads of coughers pelting the windshield and windows on every side like hailstones, the General managed to circle the building around to the side opposite the attack, sprinkling coughers behind him as they fell from the hood and roof.