District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  As the door crept slowly to his right, the thick shadows behind it were chased away in degrees and fully supplanted by the pale white light being cast from the wall-mounted emergency lamps.

  In a heartbeat, Cade’s gaze flicked from the metal chair, crossed the gray cement landing, and locked onto the pair of well-worn tennis shoes that had been toeing the back of the door. He thumbed the switch on the carbine’s forward grip, causing a stark white cone of light to lance from the tactical flashlight affixed to the M4’s forward rail. He walked his gaze up the living corpse. Saw that it had died wearing comfortable clothes: blue jeans, pink Polo, and Chuck Taylor All-Stars. The makeshift noose keeping it aloft had been passed through a tangle of overhead pipes and tied off to the stair handrail with a messy knot. Wavy blond hair framed the thing’s bloated, blue and purple face. There was a trio of raised bite marks on one side of its face, and like a road map of highways and byways, burst capillaries snaked every which way across its fluttering lids, on down its cheeks and continued their run underneath the skin-splitting ligature. Those bugged-out, bloodshot and jaundiced eyes consumed Cade as the corpse jiggled and wriggled silently like a prized catch on the end of a hundred-pound line.

  Must have sucked to have not been allowed to leave here after Casual Friday, thought Cade as he finished his split-second processing of the death scene.

  As if in agreement, the moaning down the stairs grew louder—and nearer.

  “Clear right,” Cade called, as he moved the chair aside and opened the door for the others.

  “Suicide fail,” Cross quipped, taking in the grisly sight of the male Z banging its knees and toes against the back of the door.

  At once Griff padded to the left, peered down the stairs and craned over the rail. “Still clear,” he called back softly.

  Cheeks showing a considerable rosiness clearly visible even in the low-light, Axe made his way onto the crowded landing, closing the door behind him. “Right close there, mate,” he said to Cade, the sound of nails raking the door competing with his words.

  Stealing Cade’s thunder, Griff unknowingly repeated one of Duncan’s favorite phrases. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” He paused for effect and aimed his HK down the stairs where the swaying shadows were growing longer. “Unless, that is, you guys don’t play horseshoes across the pond.”

  Now Axe was the one who said nothing as, from somewhere down the stairs, amplified and more hair-raising in the enclosed subterranean confines, the moaning started anew.

  Ignoring the noisy ghouls for the moment, Cade righted the chair. Left ankle feeling better than ever, he stepped onto the seat and ended the Z’s struggles by plunging his Gerber into its eye socket.

  “Regular Jack Kevorkian,” Axe quipped as Cade shouldered his rifle and started down the gloomy stairwell.

  ***

  With Cade running point and Axe lagging back to watch their six, the four-man team dove deeper under the towering NSA building. Three levels below the lobby, which amounted to six full switchback runs of stairs, Cade came around a right hander and spotted the source of the rising stench and disconcerting moans. Sharing the landing marked Sublevel 3 with the jumble of rolling office chairs preventing them from climbing the stairs was a recent turn and a badly decomposed first turn. The former was male, mid-thirties, and had been scratched and bitten multiple times about the arms and face. He died wearing clothes much like the failed suicide victim upstairs. Only Casual Friday for this guy, probably mid-level management, or a GS-5 in government ranks, was slacks and Oxford. The once-white button down was stained with food and bore yellowed rings under the arms that bespoke of a lengthy post Z-Day stay at good ol’ Club NSA.

  The first turn was female and barely clothed. What remained of her blouse and pants were shredded, bloodied in spots, and soiled greatly with dried mud that looked to have come from the Fort Meade grounds some time ago. An identification tag was still clipped to a scrap of fabric that may have been a breast pocket.

  “Looks like misery loves company,” Griff said over Cade’s shoulder, his weapon-mounted light flicking on and painting a second pair of twice-dead Zs in a revealing light. Tucked away to the team’s right, partially hidden under the stairwell, were two more female zombies in much the same shape as the first turn. Same dried mud. Same defensive wounds and blood dried to black on the arms. And the same office casual attire that all but screamed these people had no idea what was about to go down in and around the District.

  Beyond the barrier and reaching hands of the agitated Zs was a closed door identical to the one on the main floor—gore streaks, card reader and all. Cade took one more step then halted, thumbed the M4 off Safe, and stuck the suppressor against the first turn’s forehead.

  “Check your fire,” said Griff over the comms. “There’s sensitive stuff behind the Zs.”

  Trusting his teammate unequivocally, Cade lowered his rifle and drew the Gerber. Too late. The first turn had snaked one spindly arm through the barrier and found purchase on his MOLLE rig, ripping back a Velcro strap and sending a full magazine on a slow tumble to the floor. Grabbing the thing by the wrist, Cade glanced down at the flopping ID tag and said, “Will one of you please put Miss Lockwood down for me?”

  Squeezing past Cade on the right, Griff parted the top couple of leather, high-backed chairs and grabbed the walking cadaver by the wrist and throat. In one fluid and overpowering move, he twirled the undead woman around to face Axe, who was ready with a drawn dagger that slid cleanly tip-to-hilt into the thing’s left eye socket.

  Cade sliced the tendons in its wrist to release the dead fingers locked onto his chest rig.

  “Just like we knew what we were doing,” Griff said, looking at Cade.

  “She almost got you, mate,” said Axe, emphasizing “almost” as a subtle dig to Griff. “And she ain’t U-shaped nor does she have a pin to pull.”

  “Thanks,” said Cade, looking to Griff. “I owe you. Now kill the fresh one so you can tell me why you didn’t want me to shoot these two in the first place.”

  Griff pulled a chair from the bottom of the pile, starting a fabric, leather, and chrome avalanche that freed the Oxford-wearing Z to shuffle toward him unimpeded. “Because,” he said, wrapping a gloved hand around the GS-5’s neck, “one ricochet could’ve introduced liquid under tremendous pressure to dozens of CRAY-RS supercomputers with enough electricity coursing through them to light up a hundred electric chairs. It could have ended badly for all of us.”

  Shooting Griff a look that said spill the rest, Cade regained his grip on the M4 and plucked the reader card from his pocket.

  As Griff opened his mouth to elaborate, he was interrupted by something impacting the door from the other side with sufficient enough force to make it flex against its hidden hinges.

  Then the keen of nails raking metal began.

  So Griff cleared his throat and spoke loudly enough to be heard over the undead awaiting them on the other side of the door to Sub Level-3 where, during the pre-mission briefing, Nash had promised they would find the NSA’s newest off-the-books addition to their main above-ground Data Collection Center.

  Under the watchful eye of the rest of the team, Griff went into detail about the original Data Collection Center they had overflown on the way in, telling them about the first floor where the banks of computers were housed and then finishing with the stunning fact that the eight-thousand-tons of water and Fluorinert used to cool the dozens of CRAY supercomputers’ very hot electronic components was housed on the floor directly above the DCC.

  Working a gloved finger under his tactical bump helmet to scratch an itch, Axe asked, “What does all of that have to do with whatever the beasties are guarding beyond this door? And just what in the bugger is Fluorinert?”

  “Fluorinert is the name for the 3M company’s line of electronics coolant liquids. It’s an electrically insulating, stable fluorocarbon-based—”

  Cade raised a gloved hand, cutting Griff short. “Al
l right, Bill Nye. Where’s the cooling apparatus in this building?”

  “Nash only knew this existed. As for schematics and floorplans, she couldn’t access that kind of intel.”

  “What’s your best guess?”

  To keep up with the rapid-fire exchange, both Cross and Axe were shifting their gazes between Cade and Griff and back again.

  After a brief pause, Griff answered, “I’d put the water pumps on Sub Level 2 then excavate deeper and run pipes down and let gravity do most of the work.”

  “You’d still have to pump the water and Fluorinert back up to keep it circulating,” Cross proffered.

  Cade shook his head. “We’re here to destroy the computers and wipe data anyway. So what difference does it make?”

  Cocking his head, Griff said, “I thought I was clear about water and its propensity to conduct electricity.”

  Cade cast a cursory glance at the walls and ceiling. He picked up something different here. Whereas the dimensions of the doorway, stair runs and landings were the same here as they were sixty-some-odd feet overhead at the main level entry, the texture on the cured cement was different. Though still constructed from poured concrete that was no doubt reinforced with rebar, there were imprints from the plywood sheeting molds as well as coarse spots showing where pebbles and a few larger quarter-sized river rocks protruded from the poorly finished surfaces. Everything about the work here was much different than the fine craftsmanship exhibited from the main floor stairway on down to Sub Level 1. He figured the same tight-lipped government contractors had done the work on both the original basement and this new, deeper addition. But going by the unusual techniques employed here, different crews must have worked each project. Easier to keep the new additions secret by compartmentalizing the task, he guessed.

  Whatever the reasons for staggering crews, clearly the construction of this stop-gap facility had been rushed. Whether the haste had been spurred on by delays of the yet to be finished mega-data storage facility—strangely enough, before the dead began to walk, slated to go in near Camp Williams in Draper, Utah—or whispers of a whistleblower spy working inside the NSA here at Fort Meade, Cade hadn’t a clue and didn’t want to venture a guess. What he did know, however, was that this annex was finished a year ago and he had a job to do now. Water-cooling pipes and machinery and electricity were things the Chinese wouldn’t waste time fretting over, therefore he couldn’t afford to either.

  Having finally come to a hard-fought conclusion, Cade looked each man in the eye, starting with Cross and finishing with Griff. “We better stay frosty and shoot straight and true then, men.” He flicked the M4’s selector to Fire, the sharp click audible to all. “Weapons free,” he said, a granite set to his jaw.

  More soft thuds against the door.

  Suddenly the backup lighting went out, casting the well into darkness. A tick later it flickered, then remained on, again bathing the stairs in a muted veil of golden light.

  “You don’t want to scope the door first?” Cross asked soberly.

  Having moved away from the door, Axe was now staring daggers at the wall-mounted light fixture.

  Sounding as if the dead were scraping the paint off the door from top to bottom, the noise of fingernails raking metal reverberated up and down the cramped stairwell.

  Ignoring the nerve-jangling racket, Cade said, “We’ve got to go in no matter what. Axe, you retreat to the next landing and cover us. Griff, get my back on the landing here.” He paused for a second, thinking. “Cross, dig out a mini-Screamer. I’ll open the door and you throw for the end zone.”

  “Copy that,” Cross and Griff said in unison.

  Incredulous, the SAS man said, “You don’t even want to know how many of the buggers are in there beforehand?”

  Cade said nothing. Instead, to indicate that he’d made up his mind on the matter, he took the pass card from his pocket and tapped it against his palm while Cross went about preparing for deployment a golf-ball-sized mini-Screamer.

  Chapter 57

  The F-650 was crawling along at walking speed when its front bumper met the jostling throng of snarling zombies head on.

  Thirty to forty my ass, Jamie thought, taking in the sight. Then, shouting so the others to be heard through the open rear slider, she said, “Looks like we’ve got seventy or eighty rotters up here.” After a split second’s contemplation, with the Zs’ pale, bony hands already groping the bumper and hood and fenders up front, she added nervously, “That’s like … twenty for each of you to put down.”

  “We got this,” Taryn shouted back, her Tanto already in hand.

  In the left wing mirror Jamie saw a glint of metal as Taryn’s blade flashed out and down and disappeared into the nearest zombie’s eye socket. Imagining the grate of metal on bone, she saw the young, newly bobbed brunette’s arm and weapon draw back and the Z fall to the road, twice dead, and about to meet the Ford’s oversized rear tire.

  One down, thought Foley, as he watched the action with rapt attention through the Bushnells. Rotters number two, three, and four crashed to the road in heaps of jutting elbows and knees as he stood rooted in the bed of the Raptor, his elbows planted firmly on the flat of the roof.

  “Get some,” he crowed. After taking a quick second to look all around his own position and seeing nothing living or undead in the vicinity, he pressed the binoculars back to his eyes and glassed the area all around the rest of the group, adding extra attention to their fore where triple-strand barbed wire fences lined the road on both sides. Concentrating on keeping the image steady, he scrutinized the ochre earthen berm to the left of the group. Nothing but old tire tracks on the soft shoulder there. Swinging his gaze to the pasture on the right, the things there that caught his interest were the feeding birds, a small copse of trees beyond the raptors, and, a number of yards west of the trees, the galvanized culvert running underneath the muddy road feeding the nearby state route.

  Seeing nothing pointing to an ambush, Foley depressed the Motorola’s Talk button and relayed the positive news to the others.

  Inside the slow-moving Dodge, Duncan heard Foley’s report, the good news not nearly enough to loosen the knot in his stomach. Damn if he couldn’t relax when facing substantial numbers of the dead—at least not without his old friend Jack Daniels.

  At the moment Foley’s voice leapt from the radio’s tiny speaker the knot of walkers began spilling around the F-650’s squared-off rear bumper.

  As he reached blindly for the Saiga semi-auto shotgun, he witnessed Daymon cull two monsters with a pair of lightning-quick downward chops of his machete. By the time Duncan’s hand had found the shotgun’s polymer stock, three more rotters were out of the fight. One having fallen when Taryn reached down from the truck’s bed and thrust her blade into the child-sized shambler’s brain, and two more that were sent crashing to the road vertically, victim to Lev’s superior knife work.

  Meanwhile, on the passenger side behind Taryn, it looked to Duncan as if Wilson was having trouble timing his knife strikes. As the Ford continued rolling through the crush of bodies, the ones nearest the redhead were being repelled by the rig’s mass, which in turn had a domino effect on the rest causing them to fall even further away from his substantial reach.

  Seeing the dead being repulsed by the Ford, some of them swiping clumsily as it left them behind while others were sent tumbling headlong into the roadside ditch, Duncan took his hand off the shotgun and snatched up the radio. “Jamie,” he said. “You’ve got to slow down a bit. I know it’s counterintuitive, but you need to ride the brakes and allow the things to surround the truck.” He let up on the Talk button.

  Jamie made no reply. Instead, up ahead, the Ford’s brake lights flared red and its forward motion slowed considerably.

  That a girl, thought Duncan, easing up on the pedal to match her speed, which was hovering just south of five miles per hour.

  On his knees in the right rear corner of the F-650’s bed, Lev felt the truck slow and suddenly he
was facing a target-rich environment. Reciting every cuss word learned in the Army, all of them directed at the rotting flesh eaters less than a yard to his fore, he began to thrust his Cold Steel blade into the pale faces leering back at him.

  Wilson called out triumphantly from the other side. “I finally got one.”

  “Six more to go if you want to catch up with me,” Daymon said, his machete cleaving deeply into a Z’s cranial bone.

  “Shit, that’s seven for you now,” Wilson said over the sucking sound as he wiggled his knife free of a first turn’s leaking eye socket.

  “Less talking, Wilson,” said Lev, as there came an awful pop and crunch from the Ford’s left rear tire jouncing over something organic.

  Taking Lev’s advice to heart, Wilson pursed his lips into a thin white line, grabbed a handful of one ghoul’s greasy hair, and drove his knife hilt deep into one of its wildly roving eyes.

  Duncan watched the dead dropping to the road at a much faster pace. In less than thirty seconds, by his estimation, the number of dead had been cut in half. And considering the battering the Ford had taken from the flailing arms and sheer weight of the bodies pressing in on it, even without Taryn at the wheel, it had never wavered from the slow steady course he’d asked for. “Good job,” he said into the Motorola. “You kids have found a rhythm. Keep it up for just a bit longer.”

  “A bit longer” turned out to be an additional twenty seconds. After which the rotters numbered no more than thirty.

  “Stop her right there on the centerline,” Duncan drawled, steering the Dodge to the shoulder to keep from running over the amassed corpses.

  Amazingly, the push-back he’d expected from Jamie over being ordered to stop with close to half of the rotters still assaulting the truck never materialized. Instead, as before, the brake lights flared red and the Ford stopped completely.

  In the F-650, with the remaining dead enveloping the truck, Jamie stared straight ahead, drumming her fingers on the wheel. As soon as the first pale palm slapped the glass near her head, she closed her eyes and said a little prayer for Oliver, asking that wherever he was, he wasn’t suffering. Then she flashed back to her own time spent in captivity at the hands of Ian Bishop and his right-hand man, Carson. As if she was watching old jittery film reel footage, she saw Jordan’s shocked expression as Bishop’s men dragged them from the shot-up garage at the upper quarry. Clear as day, though the traumatic event was weeks in the past, she heard Jordan calling for help as a dirty, burlap hood was pulled over her head and she was shoved into a waiting helicopter.