District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  It was the last time she had seen the young woman alive.

  She threw a shudder. Not from the keen of fingernails raking the door by her leg. Not from the imagined picture in her mind of the contorted faces of the undead things trying to get to her. Nor was she shaken by the idea that whoever had left the crumbs for them to follow may be waiting for them at Bear Lake with more people and firepower than eight people could handle.

  Nope.

  None of the above.

  Jamie was, in her own way, processing the fact that the night before, around the campfire, she may have set eyes on Oliver for the final time. She took little solace from the knowledge that the crazies from the North—as Ray and Helen had called the nameless and faceless antagonists—didn’t appear to have a single helicopter, let alone a fleet of them. Because if what they had already proven they were capable of doing was their worst, then being thrown from a helicopter like Jordan had been would probably be a better fate for Oliver than the former. God, it killed her thinking about how hard a hit Glenda was going to take if she was right in her assumption.

  With the non-stop screech of fingernails raking both of the truck’s flanks already driving her close to madness, Jamie pushed the bad thoughts away and opened her eyes to see one particularly tenacious rotter making out with the glass inches from her face. On the brink of pulsing her window down and unloading the Beretta into Casanova to silence the incessant clicking of his teeth on the clouded side glass, she had a sudden epiphany that gave her pause.

  Out of sight was easy. Just close your eyes again.

  Out of mind, not so much. At least not until she powered on the stereo and two things happened. First, the LCD display lit up with a soft red glow. Then, completely drowning out all the myriad noises produced by the zombies’ all-out assault on the truck, a long dead rapper began spitting rhymes about New York, high priced hos and a lifestyle filled with bling and champagne.

  A millisecond after the first stanza faded, the bass line dropped and she was receiving a butt massage from what seemed like a dozen speakers hidden from sight directly underneath the front seat.

  Chapter 58

  A cursory glance at the jamb and sweep told Cade that this door was different than the one they had used to access the maintenance stairwell from the main floor hallway.

  Cross kneeled down and pried at the bottom edge with his knife. Shaking his head, he said, “There’s no room for the device.”

  “I have an idea,” Cade said, fishing the pass card from his pocket. He ran through what he expected from each man, then turned back and waved the card in front of the gray panel where a handle should have been.

  The pass card worked on the first try. As with the main level door, there was a soft click when the bolt gave way. However, unlike the door three levels up, when Cade pushed in on this one, as if a seal had been broken, there was an audible hiss followed at once by a blast of cool air heavy with the reek of death and decay.

  A little more pressure from his shoulder told Cade that there were dead things pressing their rotten flesh against the other side.

  “Like we discussed,” Cade said, his eyes locked on Cross.

  Cross nodded, then began counting down from three.

  Shoulder and palms planted against the door, Cade counted down with Cross.

  At two, Griff let his rifle hang from its sling and placed his gloved hands on the door a few inches to the right of Cade’s.

  On one, using every ounce of strength at their disposal, Cade and Griff leaned into the door, bulling it inward a few inches.

  Instantly, a gnarled hand shot through the opening. The crooked, pale fingers scrabbled around the door’s edge dangerously close to Cade’s face. In the next beat Cross hurled the armed Screamer sidearm through the narrow opening, clearing the reaching hands by mere inches.

  “You call that a Hail Mary,” Griff said between grunts brought on by keeping pressure on the door.

  M4 held at a low ready, Axe called down from his perch midway up the stairs. “Again with the football reference?”

  Beaded sweat was forming on Griff’s brow. “Says the bloke not shoring up the offensive line. Trade me places?” he said, only half-joking.

  The half-dozen bony hands probing the opening were now joined by a single pallid face. As the thing worked its left cheek past the door’s edge, its teeth clicked and clacked and a low steady hiss emanated from deep down in its chest.

  “Give me five more seconds, Griff,” Cade bellowed.

  “Doing my best.”

  At ten seconds the Screamer remained silent.

  At eleven, still nothing. No recorded screams of a long-dead woman came from within the DCC.

  No sooner had Cade looked to Griff and ordered him to prepare a second device than the first came alive with the same high-pitched wail the larger unit had emitted inside the Ghost Hawk. Though the mini-Screamer was a fraction of the size as the ones deployed to keep the hordes busy upstairs, this little sucker packed a sonic punch—especially in the enclosed, low-ceilinged room.

  The second the Screamer went live, the resistance on the door disappeared and Newton’s Law was in full effect.

  The only thing halting the equal and opposite reaction part and saving the door from swinging completely inward at great speed and spilling Cade and Griff into a room full of hungry Zs was Cross springing to action.

  Unbeknownst to the two off-balance operators, after hurling the device Cross had slipped one gloved hand over the door’s top edge. And as the cool metal slab suddenly went light against Cade and Griff’s combined weight, Cross had reacted by shooting his arm between the two operators and grabbing a fistful of Cade’s MultiCam blouse.

  As Cross pulled Cade and Griff away from the door, he stole a quick glance at the ceiling inside the DCC. And in that snapshot in time what he saw validated Griff’s earlier warning. Where there should have been drop-down ceiling tiles, he saw pipes of all different sizes crisscrossing the ceiling left to right. And intertwined with the larger conduits like spaghetti noodles on a fork, smaller hoses wormed in and out of every available crevice.

  “Griff’s correct,” Cross stated calmly as the door slammed shut, severing four fingers off the lone Z that hadn’t gone after the Screamer. “The cooling apparatus is overhead.”

  Taking a chance, Cade passed the card in front of the jamb and cracked the door an inch. When no clammy appendages tested the opening, he said, “Griff,” and stabbed a thumb over his head.

  Griff looked at the ceiling through the sliver. “Gentlemen, we cannot afford to have any stray rounds go high.”

  Cross looked to Axe on the stairs. “Can you see what the Zs are doing?”

  “Can’t see past the computer cases, mate.”

  “We’ll give them a minute,” Cade said, closing the door and shutting out the all-too-real screams.

  ***

  The minute passed by slowly.

  The Screamer didn’t falter.

  And the dead didn’t resume their assault on the door.

  Cade used the pass card again and, after taking a cursory glance through the cracked door and finding nothing obstructing its swing on the opposite side, he nudged it slowly across the threshold. He padded a few feet into the dimly lit room and paused at the head of the center aisle, which was one of four running lengthwise between four identical banks of computers, their cases dark red—almost burgundy—and emblazoned at eye level with the CRAY RS logo. After a quick computation, Cade determined that thirty-two of the foot-wide, rectangular items were packed into the front third of the oblong room. Head-high to him and arranged side-by-side like soldiers standing to attention, each row consisting of eight computers looked to measure about thirty feet from front to back.

  Though the steadily humming electronics ran hot, the temperature here was on par with the outside world—fifty-five degrees or so, Cade guessed. Underfoot, the once-white floors were dirtied by prints left behind by bare feet, most of them muddy, some red with bl
ood. The walls were also white and smudged with handprints and splotches of bodily fluids transferred there by the restless Zs.

  Immediately after pouring into the DCC single file, gun barrels leading the way, Axe peeled off left, heading for the aisle furthest away from the door. Meanwhile, Cross and Griff went right, each hooking a left down an aisle of their own, Cross moving in a combat crouch up the one next to Cade’s, while Griff hustled between the row of computers near the far wall.

  Suddenly the Screamer went silent and the guttural sounds of the dead rose over the hum of computers.

  Broadcast over the comms, Cade heard Axe say, “Contact,” which was followed near instantaneously by suppressed gunfire and the tinkle of brass dancing across the tile floor.

  In the next half-beat both Cross and Griff were calling out that they were also engaging the dead.

  They’re aware of us, Cade thought, his gut clenching. In his mind’s eye, he saw an overhead view of the room: Axe on his far left flank, moving and firing. Then, based on the distinctive sound of the suppressed MP7 echoing off the ceiling to his immediate right, Cross working his way between his row of CRAY computers. Finally, bookending the team on the far right, judging by the satisfying hammering of the HK’s short stroke piston—clearly audible over the suppressed reports from the lead it was spitting—he saw Griff dealing second death to the Zs in his sector.

  “Contact center,” he called, a tick after the Screamer—no doubt jostled to life by one of the dead things—resumed blaring from the center of the room. At the end of his row of computers, Cade saw the periphery of an undead scrum which consisted of at least a dozen Zs pig-piled atop each other and digging for the noise emitter at the bottom of the crush.

  As Cade heel and toed it between the CRAY cases full of red and green lights blinking incessantly behind rectangular panes of clear glass, he began picking off the dead in his path, one carefully measured double-tap at a time.

  Acrid gun smoke filled the air around his head while, propelled by his new Danner boots, spent brass skittered and jumped about the mud-streaked floor ahead of his steady advance.

  Nearing the last computer in the bank with the room opening wide in front of him, time seemed to slow for Cade. All at once he heard Cross’s MP7 go silent. Changing mags, he guessed. Then the steady clatter of Griff’s weapon ceased and in his headset he heard the operator declare his zone clear of Zs.

  No word came from Axe, just the steady, comforting chug of a suppressed M4 coming from the far left.

  After dropping a pair of Zs to the floor in a bony, ashen-skinned heap, Cade changed mags and charged his M4.

  Axe’s M4 went mute and he called his side clear.

  Cade stopped short of the waist-high swarm of Zs that had been lured away from the door by the siren’s call of the Screamer. Targeting only the heads clearly visible in the squirming organic mass, he stilled the three Zs nearest him. As he shifted aim looking for clean shots, two things happened, one right after the other. First, an emaciated female zombie pushed up off the floor and fixed its milky eyes on him. Reacting instantly, he caressed the trigger twice. The initial bullet punched through the Z’s septum, sending her balding head hinging backward. Speeding along at almost three thousand feet per second, bullet number two was supposed to have punched out the thing’s right eye, finishing the job the first lead missile started. Instead, the second round of Cade’s carefully aimed double-tap caromed off the pale white expanse of the monster’s forehead. A millisecond later, its trajectory irrevocably altered, the 62-grain hunk of screaming lead was swallowed up by the tangle of pipes running across the ceiling twenty-five feet behind the female Z. After entering the overhead warren, the bullet must have ricocheted, because it made a sound like a smith’s hammer striking hot metal.

  Astonishingly, the errant bullet didn’t have an immediate negative effect.

  Circling away from the scrum, Cade looked left and saw Axe cease firing for a split second and gape upward at the pipes. To Cade’s right, Cross emerged from the computers, stepping over bodies and changing his magazine. On the far side of Cross, Griff was already standing before the last CRAY tower in his row. A table had been pulled away from the nearby wall. All of the items that looked to have been on the table now lay on the floor: Papers spilled out of manila folders. Sharpie pens and legal pads containing notes jotted down in a sloppy hand. A leather-bound logbook of some sort, its pages ripped and muddy, was propped up against the wall.

  Snaking across the table were dozens of multicolored wires in various gauges. Tracing the wires with his eye, Cade saw that they spilled off the side of the table, ran across the floor and climbed the nearest CRAY to which they were still connected.

  Wearing a pained look, Griff said, “The effin Chicoms beat us to it.”

  Cade cursed under his breath. He stared daggers at the tangle of wires, not so much pissed at any one person, but mostly at Mr. Murphy for the mechanical problems grounding the helo that in a roundabout way allowed the enemy to get here first.

  “We’ve got a leak,” Cross said, gesturing to the floor twenty-five feet to his fore.

  “It won’t be requiring a Dutch girl,” Axe said, trying to lighten the mood.

  Watching the water turn into a steady stream, the initial puddle already doubling to kiddie-pool-size, Cade reminded the team to stay clear lest they get a dose of the kind of voltage Old Sparky of death row fame used to administer.

  “We still have a job to do,” Griff said, shrugging off his pack. He dove in and came out with bricks of C4 and detonators to set it off.

  “Make it quick,” Cade implored. He pointed to the floor by the table where muddy boot prints with a familiar lug pattern were interspersed with the morass tracked in by the Zs. “They might still be close. If they are, we’ll catch them.”

  Just off of Cade’s left shoulder a second hose near the initial leak let loose a new stream of liquid. It was thicker than water and began to pool a dozen feet from the CRAY tower Griff was rigging with explosives.

  “Watch yourselves,” Axe said, returning from collecting the Screamer from beneath the twice-dead Zs. “We now have two pipes engaged in a pissing contest.”

  For a long moment there was no reply, only the rustling of Griff’s MultiCam fatigues as he worked quickly to wire the explosives.

  The liquid from the second leak swirled and mixed with the blood and mud on the floor as it spread and merged with the first puddle, creating a wide morass creeping dangerously close to the electronics.

  “Finished,” Griff said, as he shrugged his nearly empty pack on and scooped up his rifle.

  “This way,” Cade ordered, eyes sweeping the floor as he skirted the creeping liquid and followed the retreating boot prints deeper into the vast room.

  Though the dead had trooped this way recently, the Chicom-patterned boot prints stood out and were easy to follow. They led to an open door at the far corner of the underutilized room.

  On the wall inside the hallway Cade saw vague shadows undulating eerily.

  He stopped underneath a wall-mounted emergency lamp, looked to Griff and asked, “Time until detonation?”

  “Ten minutes,” Griff answered.

  Cade glanced at his watch, noting the time.

  “Cutting it damn close,” Axe said.

  For the first time since entering the building, Cade consulted the floorplan Nash had provided. He checked the compass on his Suunto then scrutinized the map for a few seconds, turning it this way and that before refolding it and stowing it in a pocket.

  Looking toward the hallway with the moving shadows, he said, “That tunnel isn’t on the map. Nor is this half of the DCC. If my bearings are correct, it should run underneath the road and end up below the original DCC.”

  Cross said, “The building with the round domes on top.”

  “Exactly,” Cade answered. “And our data thieves might still be in the building.”

  Shaking his head, Axe muttered, “Elvis has left the building.�
��

  “Stay close,” Cade said to Cross and Griff. “Axe, you got our six.”

  “Great,” Axe said jokingly. “Make me the red shirt of the team.”

  Smiling at the Star Trek reference, Cade shouldered his M4 and crabbed toward the yawning doorway and an eventual meeting with whatever was responsible for the wavering, spectral shadows.

  Chapter 59

  Crouched down low in the bed, Wilson lashed out with his right, scrambling yet another Z’s brain with a well-placed knife thrust to the eye. As he watched the unlucky first turn go limp and slide from his blood-slickened blade, the V-10 engine growl lessened and the truck ground to a sudden halt.

  “Why are we stopping?” Taryn called over her shoulder.

  “Why cut it all off?” was all Wilson could summon as he caught sight of the pale nape of her neck. The question had been on his lips since he’d made that first pass across the thick, braided ponytail with her knife. And he figured that if he was going to die here, at least he’d do so knowing what she had been thinking.

  But Taryn made no reply. Instead she continued fending off the creatures’ groping hands with her off arm while the other holding the knife worked piston-like, the blade flashing in and out with lethal efficiency. Taking a step back from the concave bed wall, Taryn drew in a lungful of air tainted by the stench of death and caught a quick glimpse of the tops of her hands and forearms. Up to where her rolled-up sleeves fell, spatters of blood and other fluids rendered the black tattoos there nearly indistinguishable.