by Duncan, Ian
Trubilinski brought the Excursion to a sudden halt beside a pedestrian door, the operators immediately unbuckling themselves and snatching up their weapons.
“Use the chaos!” Trubilinski shouted.
They bailed from the vehicle, Wes taking up the SAW and laying down covering fire as Cuban thrust the shotgun against the doorjamb and blew the bolt out with a single shot.
Sam glanced at Trubilinski on his way out the door and saw his hand pressed against his chest, blood seeping between his fingers.
“Sir! Are you hit?” For a moment Sam seemed to completely forget the Cord zombies swarming the premises.
Trubilinski’s face was already pale, but he waved him off. “Go!” he said, “I’ll do what I can to reduce the horde out here!”
Sam was unconvinced.
Trubilinski looked at him, the hint of a satisfied smile, even pride, tightening the corners of his eyes. “Go, son. Set those captives free.”
“Sir!” Sam shouted, stepping away from the door frame as Trubilinski roared away, knocking a dozen coughers flat in the first fifty feet; and what they found of him later, after the action, when they drew his body gently from the shattered fabric of the truck’s battered windows, was a man fully spent in his cause, a general in the truest sense, in command to the end, the acres of Cordyceps dead all around him his, and his very own.
Forty-Four
THE FIRST ROOFTOP hatch they came to was still locked from the inside. They already knew what lay—and what might still lie—in the grocery store below the second hatch. As yet there was no sign of the minivan when they ventured to the far parapet wall and looked down on the loading docks and dumpsters below. Cole might have worried more about the fate of Chloe and Brandon if he hadn’t been in such a predicament himself.
What little survival gear he had was gone. They had Emily’s Sig Sauer and one high-capacity magazine with perhaps ten rounds remaining. Her backpack still contained a little food leftover from the stockpile in the grocery store: a few granola bars, a couple bruised apples, and several shrink-wrapped sticks of jerky.
Cole ate an apple and walked around the hatch, examining its hardware, while Emily sat on the rooftop and pried the HEPA respirator away from her face long enough to feed a piece of jerky, bite by bite, into her mouth. Cole didn’t know if she’d noticed the low profile of Miguel’s body, perhaps three hundred feet away, on top one of the air handlers. He wasn’t about to point it out to her.
“I can tell where the hinges are,” Cole said, turning the apple in his fingers and trying to sound optimistic.
“How do we get it open?’
“I’m working on it.”
“Cole, will you promise me something?” Emily’s voice was muffled and distorted by the respirator.
“Okay.”
“Just promise me you won’t ask me to go back down the way we came.”
Cole gazed across the rooftop toward the far cluster of air handlers that hid the grocery store’s hatch from view. “Of course not,” he said. In truth, he had already considered the option several times.
The hatch was perhaps three feet square, little more than an access panel for HVAC contractors and electricians needing access to the roof. He had found little swells in the hatch’s sheet metal lid where the hinges were attached from the other side, but he had no tools to work with, no drill, no crowbar, no shotgun—
“Wait, where’s Trudy’s shotgun?”
Emily looked up in surprise. Cole had nearly yelled the question.
“I—I don’t know.”
“She had it on the rooftop, right? Didn’t she bring it up here with her?”
“I can’t—no, she used it to smash the lock at the top of the ladder,” Emily remembered.
“And then what?” Cole asked.
“And then,” Emily’s voice trailed off, her pale eyes searching the rooftop. “She must have brought it up and over. Everything happened so quickly.”
Cole had already broken into a jog. “I’ll be right back,” he called over his shoulder.
The rubber surface of the roof flexed under his feet and Cole’s head felt strangely detached from his body as he ran. The sky was a disconsolate veneer of milk, and the rooftop stretching before him was colorless, all of it seeming the decontextualized setting of a dream, the very ground beneath his feet uncertain, and even the puddles of mirage water he saw in the distance more like holes in the fabric of reality. None of it was real.
Nothing, that is, until he came across Trudy’s body and saw the extent of the crimson puddle that had seeped from it. The blood was still vividly crimson, and her open eyes had hardly dulled, as though everything that had happened that day had taken place in the course of an hour, although in Cole’s exhausted mind time had lost every conceivable point of reference.
He began to cast about the rooftop, circling the air handlers and walking along the parapet wall where Trudy had been standing. He had begun to wonder if, in her delirium as the Cord took control of her mind, she might have simply dropped it over the edge of the wall. Then he saw the black rubber butt of the shotgun’s stock protruding from a vent pipe. She had dropped it into the open pipe like some sort of scabbard.
Even with his raw hands, Cole was able to retrieve the gun easily enough. He thumbed the release and broke open the breech. The chambers were empty.
Cole swore and circled back to Trudy’s body, stepping gingerly in the puddle surrounding her as though even her blood were somehow toxic. Her front jeans pocket contained a bulge that felt like hard and dense, like a roll of quarters. Cole worked his hand past the sewn denim hem, grimacing from the pain and making a point not to look at Trudy’s face. His fingers touched the ribbed plastic shell and he drew it out, a single round of twelve-gauge buckshot. One of the five rounds he had given her from the dead officer’s backpack.
One round.
Cole dropped it into the right barrel of the shotgun but left the action open. He walked back to Emily inking bloody footprints behind him. He sent Emily behind one of the air-handlers in case any of the pellets should ricochet. He snapped the breech closed and examined the hatch one more time, rapping with his knuckles in a certain spot as one might search for the studs in a wall before driving a nail.
He decided to stand on the hatch itself, taking careful aim downward, holding the barrel only two feet from the surface, but then he imagined the possible ricochet and adjusted the angle of the barrel, tilting it to a twenty or thirty-degree angle by his reckoning.
“Fire in the hole!”
He pulled the trigger.
The shotgun roared, the recoil hammering Cole’s shoulder, and the tightly clustered buckshot blasting an irregular hole in the hatch nearly as big as a baseball. The hole was in the dead center of the side opposite the hinges, exactly where he had hoped the latch or locking mechanism might be located.
Emily appeared from behind the air handler just as Cole stepped off the hatch and tried to lift it. It didn’t budge. He bent to peer into the hole, seeing only darkness and sensing a profound void, as one might on the threshold of a well or the mouth of a cave plunging into subterranean depths.
Emily’s muffled voice: “It didn’t work?”
“I don’t know.” Cole fitted his hand through the opening, turning his arm carefully, like reaching through the lid of a jagged tin can. Shards of torn metal pricked him. He groped along the inside edge of the hatch until he felt a knob. He grasped it and tugged against it several ways until he felt it slide. He pushed it further.
“Okay, now!” Cole said. “Help me lift it.”
Emily got her fingers under the edge of the hatch.
“Not too fast,” Cole said. “Let me get my hand out.”
Cole extricated his arm from the jagged opening, let go of the hatch, and watched it float open on pneumatic risers.
Forty-Five
> COLE WENT FIRST, descending the ladder into near-total darkness, only a narrow column of light from the open hatch above him and his indistinct shadow cast onto the concrete floor below. Beyond the shadows, the dim shapes of another retail stockroom were apparent, though at first Cole could only guess what kind of store it was. He stepped off the ladder into a maze of boxed appliances, many of them still strapped to whitewood pallets. The instant he let go of the ladder, he pulled Emily’s pistol from his waistband. She had given it to him for the descent.
Cole moved through the boxes with the pistol leveled and his finger laid beside the trigger. He paused between two towering refrigerators and panned the pistol slowly across the room, his eyes adjusting to the shadows. A few ovens were arranged neatly in a line, Styrofoam guards still taped to their corners, but the order seemed to have no logic and thus communicated no warning to Cole.
Smaller boxes were marked microwave, and palletized, shrink-wrapped bundles were scattered about the concrete floor as though in the process of being sorted. On the back wall, a loading dock door stood open, the dark interior of an empty tractor trailer there like an adjoining cave. Beside the loading dock, glowing only faintly, was an exit sign over a pedestrian door.
No doorway separated the stockroom from the retail sales floor. Through a large opening that led around the corner, Cole could see orange industrial racking and what appeared to be plumbing fixtures on display: toilets, sinks, and vanities.
Cole watched and listened.
No movement.
No sound.
He stepped back to the bottom of the ladder and beckoned silently to Emily, who had been watching him all the while from the open hatch. At Cole’s signal, she swung her leg over the edge and found the topmost rung, tentatively with one foot before she trusted it with the other.
Cole waited for her at the bottom of the ladder as if holding it for her, though it was bolted to the concrete floor and there was nothing he could do to stop her if she fell.
She came down the ladder slowly, moving one foot at a time, and only moving her hands once her feet found purchase on a lower rung.
“What kind of store is this?” she said, four rungs from the bottom.
Cole could tell she was trying to speak in a low voice, but the sound still boomed in an unmusical way inside her respirator. “Some kind of a home improvement warehouse,” he said. He turned his head to listen to a faint sound he thought he had heard even while speaking. Perhaps it was only the echo of his own voice. He laid a hand on Emily’s back to steady her coming off the ladder.
“Is it safe?” she attempted to whisper.
Cole nodded. “For now.”
Emily reached up and pulled the respirator straps from her hair, uncupping the mask from her nose and mouth, where a hard red line had been pressed in her fair skin those long hours on the rooftop.
“Oh my god,” she said, touching her jaw. “I’m beginning to despise that thing.”
“It’s keeping you alive.”
“Do you think it really works? Why don’t you wear one, then?”
Cole looked at her. “I did, at first. Then I realized—”
Emily nearly doubled over, grabbing at her side. “Augh!”
“What? What is it?” Cole could only watch, unsure what was happening.
Emily straightened slowly, rubbing her belly with her hands. “Little booger is kicking the stuffing out of me today.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does it mean?” Emily repeated, her lips curling into a mocking smile. “It means there’s a little man in there that wants out.”
Cole had already forgotten the effect her face could have on him: the flashing playfulness in her eyes and mouth, and her wit, combined with that accent, that made him feel, at times, as though he were trying to make conversation with the first girl that had ever made his cheeks hot.
“I just mean, is it normal? At this point,” Cole added.
Emily smiled down at her belly, caressing the hemispheres of it with her palms. “It’s very normal,” she said.
It struck Cole again that there really was a child just beneath the skin of every pregnant woman, so close that she could already interact with it—in the womb—and the notion that a baby only became a baby upon birth suddenly seemed to him quite ridiculous. When he looked up from Emily’s belly she was smiling at him—a strange, wistful smile.
“Why are you doing all this?” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Helping me. I’m not your wife. This isn’t your baby.”
Her tone was far from alienating. To Cole it sounded filled with wonder. He glanced around the stockroom, checking the corners. It was a nervous habit he had never been able to stop, not since the first outbreak, yet another manifestation of that hypervigilance he’d never been able to explain to his psychiatrist.
“You’re a good man, Cole.”
Cole looked at her, scrutinizing those blue eyes for the slightest twinge of sarcasm or flattery, any sign that she might not fully believe that statement. There was none.
Emily’s eyes widened. From the vast, dark retail sales floor beyond them had come the unmistakable sound of a wrench or some metal tool being dropped on a concrete floor.
Cole heard voices. For the first time in several minutes, he was aware of the pistol in his hand. He grabbed Emily by the wrist and pulled her toward the door marked exit. They paused at the doorway, and Cole laid his hand on the crash bar, hesitating. Anything could be on the other side of that door, and he only had ten rounds of nine-millimeter with which to confront it.
“Cole!” Emily hissed, her eyes wide. “What if they’re survivors? What if they can help us?”
“Yeah? What if they’re not?”
They both looked back to the corner where the retail space began. A faint light glowed there, and they heard what sounded like the approach of something with a motor.
The forklift, Cole thought. Until that moment, he hadn’t made the connection that it was missing from the stockroom.
He pressed the crashbar and pushed the exit door open far enough to look outside. The rear concrete lot and the sky above it were gray, difficult to even ascertain what time of day it was. It was simply the non-time of urban America’s apocalypse. More significant were the coughers standing idly in the open space below the loading dock. At least six of them that Cole had time to notice, and no doubt the gunshots needed to neutralize those would draw even more.
Cole pulled the door closed and looked back to the corner, where the sound of the tow motor was growing louder, and the light even brighter.
Emily’s face was turned to him, desperate for a decision.
Cole nodded. “We’ll give them a chance. If anything goes wrong—” he thought about the coughers not far outside the door. Shit. Nothing could go wrong.
Emily wrapped her Marmot jacket around her belly, that additional layer apparently adding at least some small psychological comfort, another barrier between her baby and a world gone insane.
Cole put his arm around her, mostly to hide the pistol behind her back, and together they stood to face them—whoever they might be, and whatever animus they might harbor toward these, the least of their fellow survivors.
Forty-Six
THE LIGHT FLARED over a set of orange industrial racking and then the forklift swung into view bearing a pallet piled high with cardboard boxes. The forklift’s lights flooded the stockroom, making Cole and Emily squint. Cole blocked the light with his empty hand, seeing both the silhouette of the driver and another man following the machine on foot. The boxes loaded on the forklift reflected the light, glossy unopened packaging containing battery powered tools and saws and nail guns.
Cole spread the fingers of his empty hand. “How are you guys doing?”
No response from the two men. Cole saw the driver
climbing down from the forklift and their dark shapes approaching together, joined in that light into one monstrous silhouette.
“We were just passing through the store,” Cole tried. “Just trying to find shelter, like everyone else.”
They stepped into the light, unsmiling men in gray coveralls with shaved heads and hawkish features, their eyes either startled or stoned into pinpoints. They were either brothers, or the life they’d lived had rendered them the same, or they were followers of the same way of life, some cult of postindustrial crudity. One held a crowbar by his side, and the other held some dark object, too, either a weapon or a tool Cole could not see in the glare of the lights. What Cole could see, and what became immediately apparent, was that the two men were paying him no attention at all, staring fixedly at Emily, and Cole saw the eyes of the closest man descend her body before the hint of a bemused smile curled one side of his mouth and he turned to look at his companion.
Cole hauled the Sig Sauer out from behind Emily’s back, stepping away from her as he snapped it up, the fireball from the barrel nearly blocking his view of his target, popping off round after round, furious concussions for each of the men in succession, back and forth, before the stunned expressions on their faces gave way to agony and they collapsed to the floor, the crowbar clattering on the concrete.
Cole lowered the pistol. A terrible silence ensued. A haze of gunsmoke hung in the air as though it were a fog he had exhaled.
“I said hello, goddamn it,” he muttered. He looked down at the Sig Sauer clenched in his hand. The action was blown back, smoke curling from the empty chamber. Ten rounds, and he’d used them all.
One of the looters lay sputtering, bright blood coating his chin like a crimson beard. The weapon he had held in his hand had been no more than a large D-cell flashlight, rolling away from him now. Cole kicked viciously at the man’s legs.