by Joshua Guess
In his momentary deafness, he hadn’t heard the screams around him, but even in pantomime the terror in the room was clear. Lab coated bodies hunkered and huddled in every direction. Despite himself, Kell actually felt pity for them. They were stuck in an endless loop, always terrified of the world but never able to do anything about it.
Except seize power, but that didn’t really address the overall problem. These people weren’t inherently cowards. Or if they were inclined to fear, it wasn’t a character flaw. Just as he had been shaped by necessity, so had they been by their isolation. Down here they had no rough edges to rub against in order to toughen their minds to better cope with the harsh reality waiting outside.
Certainly they weren’t used to colleagues getting murdered right in front of them.
“Sorry,” said the guard. “Finger slipped.”
Kell regarded her with a critical eye. “Sure. Happens to the best of us. Is it gonna slip against me, or can I get out of here and find my friends?”
The guard sucked in the corner of her mouth thoughtfully. “We won’t stop you, but that seems stupid dangerous. Don’t you only have one leg?”
“No, I have two. I just don’t know where the other one is right now,” Kell said. “I am unarmed, so that’s gonna suck. Suppose I could hit them with my scissor arm.” He waved it gently, and then examined the wound. “Kind of afraid to take it out.”
The older woman, peeking over a table from her hiding place, rose up slightly. “I can take a quick look at it, if you want.”
The other guard, a man of about thirty, reached onto the back of his belt and produced an expanding baton. “Here. I don’t think I’ll need this down here.”
Kell took the weapon gratefully, perfectly aware that both guards still kept a wary eye on him. “Well, look at this. Got me a healer to patch me up, and an authority figure just handed me a starter weapon. Feels like my first dungeon crawl all over again.”
“You,” said the older guard, “are a serious nerd.”
“I accept that,” Kell replied. If this ended up being his last day, he’d go out as himself.
Emily
The pirate radio broadcast caught Emily while she was alone in the suite. With Kell in a meeting—the thought of him trapped so far below was one she couldn’t let herself focus on—and Mason doing a short jog around the floor, there was no one to turn to in surprise. No one to share this moment of triumph with. She absolutely saw it that way, no matter what the eventual cost was. Because the numbers would always total lower than the bodies those scientists would rack up if left unchecked.
She allowed herself a few seconds of quiet revelry after Bobby’s voice began to fill the room, and then started getting ready for whatever might come next. The guards outside the door might decide to just walk away in the face of the truths being broadcast from the speakers, but Emily erred on the side of caution. Guards for people like her and the others would have been picked from the most loyal people available.
Lacking a weapon, Emily decided to keep herself busy.
The bathroom was built with cheap materials and lacked the same finish as one would find in a permanent residence. The walls and floors were all joined plastic. The plumbing could be easily accessed for repair by popping off panels, which Emily did. A minute of prying at the joints of the PVC drain pipe running from the small shower unit—she had to lay on the floor and stick her hand through a hole into the space beneath to manage it—won her a length of hard plastic tubing a few feet long. Thank god there was a decent horizontal piece to use.
She took it back into the common area and set it on the hard metal floor. The pipe was standard two inch, and fairly tough. Rather than try breaking it by stepping on the curve of the pipe, which was the strongest part, she grabbed the folding chair and attacked the edge.
Nothing. Hmm.
Emily looked around for inspiration, finding it almost immediately. She snatched up the plastic tube and made her way to the door leading to the small bedroom. The door, unlike the rest of the place, was durable and heavy wood with a steel core. This was a survival bunker, after all. Every space needed to function as a true shelter against outside attack. She put the edge of the pipe on the floor right inside the door frame, stepped on it to hold it in place, and slammed the door as hard as she could.
A satisfying crack filled the air. Once she had a break to work with, the rest was easy. Emily splintered the pipe into shards and went about turning them into knives. It wasn’t a pretty process. Normally she’d find a way to heat them and flatten the curved pieces as well as shape the blades, but that was the work of hours. She didn’t have that kind of time.
Instead she did the best she could to make the pieces vaguely knife-shaped and wrapped the wider parts with tape. First electrical, then duct tape. Because of course they had both. No one in their group would have left home without them.
When the door swung open without warning, Emily had two of the weapons in her hands. She sprung to the feet, falling into a knife-fighter’s stance instantly.
Mason stopped short, raising his hands. “Whoa there, sister.”
“Scared the crap out of me,” she said, tossing him one of the blades. “Here, got you a present.”
If Mason had any critiques to make about the shiv, he kept them to himself. He tucked the blade into his belt and started gathering up their gear. “Any idea where the guards went?”
Emily cursed to herself. “Damn, I lost a bet with my own optimism. I thought for sure they’d hang around.”
“No, they’re long gone,” Mason said. “It’s a madhouse out there. I think everyone in the whole bunker is out of their rooms, kinda wandering aimlessly through the halls. Couple of them are gathering in the open—”
Mason was interrupted by a piercing scream. Emily snatched up the third plastic knife and launched herself toward the door. “Leave the gear. We can come back for it later.” Even if they couldn’t, there was nothing irreplaceable here.
“What are you planning on doing?” Mason asked. “These pig stickers aren’t going to hold up to much punishment.”
“Probably not,” Emily conceded. “I’m still going. There are children here, Mason. I’m not going to let some angry dick with a gun make a bad situation into a tragic one.”
Without another word or even looking back to see if he followed, she left the suite.
The chaos in the hallways was easy enough to navigate. Emily moved in the direction of the scream—now joined by angry shouts—while everyone else moved away from it. This level was a mixture of storage and living units, and the odd construction and high ceiling made the sounds echo and reverberate.
The grid of hallways gave way to the wider spaces of the storage section, and Emily saw what all the fuss was about. The last two of five guards, the other three dead on a flood drenched with a wide slick of blood, were trying to fend off a dozen zombies with their batons.
“Bet they wish they’d been allowed to carry guns around us now,” Mason said from behind her.
It was a smart call, Emily thought. Letting the elite guards have firearms made sense, but these guys weren’t them. These were the nine to five type. Mostly regular people who wouldn’t have a chance against someone like Mason or Emily if they wanted to take a weapon from them.
“Goddammit,” Emily said, and threw herself into the fray.
The good news was that the zombies were sluggish, clearly still warming up. In many ways, Emily was the balance between her male counterparts. She had Kell’s analytical abilities, if not his penchant for academics, and Mason’s grasp of psychology minus the extra training and years of practice. Which was why she jumped in to help these people. They were terrified, in pain, and yet they did their jobs. They put themselves between other people and the danger, and Emily would be dead in the ground before she let people like that go without her help.
Her ability to analyze was also why she felt reasonably sure this would end badly. She was good, but there was only so much you could do w
ith a plastic knife against beings virtually impervious to stab wounds.
Rather than try for her usual swift kills, the focus was on delaying and separating. Emily knocked one zombie into another to take the pressure off one of the guards, and then grabbed the one he was fighting by the neck from behind. Lacking the mass of the others, she had to improvise to make the throw work.
With her back to the zombie, Emily reached back behind her head to wrap her arm around its neck. She planted her plastic blade into its throat for the sake of convenience and a bit more leverage, then jumped straight up. For a second, she and the dead man were in perfect balance. She tucked her legs up as high as she could get them before flexing her body as hard forward as possible. Physics was a tricky bitch, but worked in her favor.
Emily’s weight and momentum bent the zombie backward, yanking it away from its victim. Its tumble was graceless and messy, leaving the dead man on his face. Emily didn’t even try to yank the knife free; it cracked in her hand during the landing. Instead she leaped to her feet and stomped her boot on its neck as hard as she could several times in quick succession.
Weeks—months, if she was being honest—of pent-up frustration came out at once. Not in a reckless, stupid way. Emily was not that person. No, her reined in anger came out as a focused barrage of violence and motion.
As soon as the neck beneath her heel cracked with a gristly set of pops, Emily was blurring across the bloody concrete once more. Her path seemed to careen wildly, but there was a brutal logic to it. She slammed into a zombie locked in a death struggle with a female guard slowly losing the fight with the wrists gripped in her hands. The claws were only inches away from tearing into her face when Emily hit the zombie like a cannonball and knocked it sideways.
“Here!” Mason said to her, projecting his voice like a stage actor.
She looked over in time to see him toss something at her, and in one of those unplanned moments of perfect synergy, his throw and her catch synced together without flaw. The baton landed in her palm neatly. Her fingers tightened on it as she continued the arc of her swing, the heavy tip crashing into the zombie’s skull with titanic force.
The hit was hard enough to slough away a flap of skin along with a section of skull and brain. The trauma stunned the zombie but didn’t quite drop it, so Emily brought the tip of the baton around and jammed it onto the small hole, which did the trick nicely.
She pulled the weapon free and spun to find another enemy only to come up empty. Mason, the Einstein of violence he was, had cut a wide swath through the swarm. The remaining guards must have rallied at the sight, because they were cleaning up the remainder.
“Where did they come from?” the female guard asked, eyes wide with fear or excitement—maybe both. “Did one of the storage units fail?”
Emily frowned. “You guys keep zombies in storage? No, of course you do. The doctors would need them.”
“That had to be it,” the guard said.
“Wait,” Emily interrupted, raising a hand. “One of them? How many storage containers full of dead people do you have?” Then, because Emily needed to build at least a little trust, she asked the woman’s name.
“I’m Andi,” she said, pointing to the name tape on her chest. “Andi Wilkes. There are, uh, I think one on most levels. Two on the dedicated storage levels.”
“And you were all just okay with this?” Emily asked incredulously.
Andi shrugged. “They were kept cool, which made them inert. The boxes have inch-thick steel doors with three automatic locks. When we move them, they don’t even start to wake up until they’ve been in the cage for a few minutes. It was worth the risk.”
By now several other guards and Mason had circled close. Emily shot him a questioning look, which he returned with a slight nod. Carry on, that nod said. I’ll follow your lead.
One of the other guards, a stout black man holding his hand to a claw wound on his temple, cleared his throat. “Is what they said over the PA system true?”
Their faces turned to her with a spectrum of emotions plastered across them. Curiosity. Suspicion. Fear. Maybe even a little hope, as if they needed someone to give them a hard answer.
“It is,” Emily said. “You may not believe me and that’s fine. Because right now that isn’t our problem. There may be other zombies loose throughout this complex. We need to stop them.”
Andi looked skeptical. “You guys are good, but we’re not going to be enough.”
The bleeding guard nodded, which looked a little funny as his arm had to bob along with his head to keep the wound closed. “Why would you even want to help us?”
Emily looked at him, puzzled. “You’re people. This place is full of innocents who don’t deserve to die that way.”
She said it as the plain and simple truth it was. Emily had training in being sneaky and murderous when circumstances demanded, but this was not one of those cases. This was, morally speaking, as easy as it got.
“Okay,” Andi said. “Say we believe you for now. What do we do next?”
Emily smiled. “You get us to some weapons. If you know where ours are being held, even better. Then you get us to the detention level. We have some people in lockup who’d be thrilled to lend a hand.”
Mason
No one tried to stop them, or even paid much attention, as the small group checked the rest of the level. Mason felt a bit like a character in a video game. Search the area for weapons and power-ups, clear enemies, move on to the next level for a harder challenge.
“Hope there’s not a boss fight at the end,” he muttered.
“What?” Andi said. Mason waved it away.
It was on the staircase between levels that they ran into trouble. Two men stood with pistols drawn when the group appeared. Mason was in the lead, with Emily next to him, since their clothing was armored against zombies.
“What the hell?” one of the gun-toting men said. “What are they doing walking around in this? They should be under watch in their quarters.”
“Are you talking to me or to one of the people with us?” Mason asked. “We’re standing on stairs, and the angle is funny. Makes it hard to tell.”
“Cute,” the man said. “Are you people responsible for this? Letting the zombies loose?”
Mason blinked. The thought was so preposterous that it caused a rare moment for him. He overlooked the possibility that anyone would think so. “How exactly would we have pulled that off?”
Mason was acutely aware that his words caused the guard’s finger to twitch on the trigger. “I don’t know. How did your people take control of the public address system?”
That hit close to home. Getting an electrical engineer inside the place, especially finding one that could do the work without making it obvious he was giving himself a back door into the control system, was a fucking nightmare. The man with the gun clearly didn’t have the patience for a long explanation, so Mason defaulted to the basics.
He lied. “It was one of your people, a good man, who made the announcement. He had access to the system, and he did it because it was the right thing to do. We don’t want a fight. We just want to get through that door you’re guarding so we can help fight the zombies in there.”
“Not happening,” the guard said. “There were too many for us to handle. Damn box was just refilled. Must be thirty of them in there.”
Mason noted the lack of sweat, dirt, blood, injuries, zombie gunk, or even out of place hairs on the two men. “So you just ran out here instead of protecting your people.” It wasn’t a question.
The guard’s face bloomed scarlet. “We’re making sure nothing gets out and into the stairwell.”
Mason took a breath. Then another. The tension was palpable, like a steel cable pulled tight between two giant stones balanced on their edges. All it would take for things to tumble badly was a single gust of wind.
“I’m not asking you to go in there with us,” Mason said. “We want to help the people inside. If we die, you lose
nothing. If we actually manage it, so much the better.”
“You’re not going in,” the man said. “Turn around and go back where you came from. You can wait for this to be over and we’ll deal with all of you then.”
There was no quaver in his voice. No hint that anything other than doing exactly what he said was even a possibility. It was a not uncommon attitude. A certain kind of person, in psychological terms, saw totems and positions as absolutes in terms of authority. A man with that profile might link the weight and killing power of a pistol as a symbol of control over a situation. Not necessarily on a conscious level. It just wouldn’t occur to him that anyone would disobey. Mason thought it might be the gun, but the position as a guard might have done the trick.
Either way, the outlook was incorrect.
“Are you going to kill us to stop us?” Mason asked.
He knew the answer before it came. The dozen small tells in carriage and bearing, the obvious internal psych-up that would end in the act of pulling the trigger.
“If I have to,” the guard said in a tight, terse voice.
Mason nodded. “Fair enough.”
His hand blurred up his center mass, pushing the butt of the pistol from below. The gun angled up quickly and wildly, the trapped thunder of its report painfully loud in the small space. Except for Emily, everyone else in the stairwell reacted as people will. They shouted and recoiled, taken off guard. Mason and Emily both knew this was probably going to be the end result, though he was only taking an educated guess as to what she was thinking. And of course it went off. In a fight with a gunman, they almost always did. Training to disarm with any competent instructor taught you to expect it.
Mason’s free hand lanced forward and delivered a full-force blow to the man’s throat. Every molecule of the fight went out of him as the tube through which breath had always flowed without much conscious thought suddenly narrowed to a point that sucking more than an inadequate wheeze through was a titanic effort.