The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One

by Peter Meredith

  Deck shrugged. "You have about five minutes before that choice is no longer mine to make."

  Thuy stalked away down the corridor and saw the destruction of her labs first hand. The rooms had been stripped of everything that could be torn down by hand and carried away. Even as she was standing there Eng walked by with her computer in his arms. "So solly," he said in his ridiculous accent.

  All her work was in that metal box. "Hold on," she said grabbing him by the shirt. "Not that."

  "But Doctoral Ree, we need must stop zombie from getting up."

  She made a face at the word “zombie.” It was hardly scientific. "What you're doing isn't working,” she said. “Or it won’t work for much longer. We need to hold the doors closed...somehow." She again stared at the door of the closest stair, her mind ticking easily. The doors opened into the stairwell, so barring them in some fashion wouldn't work. They would have to rely on simple physics to keep them closed. They would have to apply an equal or greater amount of pull on the handles as that which could be exerted from the other side.

  Force against force. Pull against pull...unless...

  "Put that back," she said to Eng, slowly, still not quite in the present. "And then get me some rope or wire. Lots of it."

  "Yes, wire is easy. Machine have much wire. Wittle wires, though."

  "Just get what you can." There wasn’t enough tensile strength in a single strand of wire to work, but if they could find enough to braid together, it might hold.

  She was just picturing what she would need when a voice said in her ear, "Are you just going to stand there while we get attacked?"

  Thuy blinked in surprise to see it was Anna who had spoken. "You?” she demanded in shock and outrage. “What are you doing..."

  "What am I doing walking around like a free person? Like I’m an actual citizen with rights? I'm trying to save our asses from whatever it is you did to those poor people."

  "Me?" Thuy thundered in a voice that could be heard down both ends of the hall. "You're the two-face traitor who..."

  "Not now, ladies," Deckard yelled as he swept past with his arms filled with binders to hurl down the stairs--they were getting desperate. “Save it for the hearing."

  Thuy stepped back, her soft lips pressed hard against her gritted teeth. "Fine. I can be civil. I need rope or heavy wire. Can I trust you to handle finding some?"

  "What about steel cable?" Anna replied, holding in her own anger by the barest margins. "All the lights in the BSL-4 labs are hung by cable."

  "Get all of it," Thuy demanded.

  Shortly, she had all the cable she could need. They came in four-foot lengths, each with fish-eye hooks at the ends. Eng, Anna, and Thuy daisy-chained them together and then went to each door, shooed people away, and strung the cable from the handle of the stairwell doors and attached it to whatever was convenient across the hall. In two cases it was attached to a railing, in the third it was to the handle of another door.

  No human, no matter how possessed of demonic strength was capable of pulling open the doors now. The scientists stood around sweating and staring at the simple contrivance and feeling somewhat stupid that they hadn't thought of it first.

  "That was smart," Deckard remarked, casually, wearing that awful, handsome smile on his lips once again. It was the one Thuy always felt the strongest desire to respond to.

  "Smart is what I do,” she replied, laying on just enough chill to dampen that roguish smile.

  Now that she'd said it, she had to prove it beyond figuring out how to lock a door. Thuy went back to her desk--the only one left on the fourth floor--hooked up her computer and sat, drumming her fingers, her eyes unfocussed as her mind grappled with the two anomalies generated by the trial: John and Jaimee Burke.

  John was apparently immune to the Com-cells, his natural defenses destroying them completely, and Jaimee seemed resistant to the worst effects. The question was why them? What made them so special?

  The obvious answer to this little puzzle lay in genetics. In other words, a random quirk of nature was keeping them from turning into mindless, cannibalistic, killing machines. It was obvious, yet with her lab in shambles there was no way for her to test the hypothesis. A part of her was ok with that. A positive genetic confirmation would mean the other infected people were simply screwed.

  "We'll move forward working on the assumption that their immunity is based on environmental factors," she said to the empty lab. Everyone else was still in the hall, listening as the infected people made it past the heaps of refuse in the stairs and were now testing the doors. For the most part they hammered on the metal with their fists. The doors shook and shivered from the blows, making the scientists feel ill at ease.

  Thuy ignored all of it--the stairwell doors were up to code. They were metal, as were their frames, and so banging or pushing would have even less effect than pulling. She stuck her head out into the hall.

  Before she could say anything, Milner asked, "Are the cops coming?"

  She shrugged. "Don't know, I never called them. Burke, I need to talk to you in my office, now."

  Chuck sniggered at him, "Sounds like y'all just might get a paddlin’, son."

  Chapter 9

  //4:51 PM//

  1

  Other than Dr. Hester's whispered phone call about "zombies", no one had yet called the police. The attacks on the third and fourth floor had occurred with such rapidity and brutality that there had been no time for anyone to make a call, except for Dr. Lee that is and she hadn't understood the extent of the problem until it was practically too late.

  On the first floor, after Earl had been killed and Jack sped off, but before the CDC personnel were eaten with their canary yellow wrappers still on them, the admin employees were under the assumption that everything was being taken care of. Yes, they had heard what sounded like gunshots, but nothing more had come of it.

  They were sitting in the break room, following the quarantine protocol and were utterly bored by it. Eventually, Morgan Pierce, whose fingers and teeth were yellowed and whose skin was more akin to leather than to flesh, stood up, straightened her skirt and said, "I need a smoke."

  The head of human resources, Preston Stuart a man who couldn't let the littlest things go, said, "You know the rules. We took the same class together, Morgan. You can't leave the building."

  "Fine, I'll smoke in the bathroom."

  "You're not allowed to smoke in there!" Preston found cigarettes to be an abomination and crusaded against them at every turn. "You'll just need to wait."

  Morgan had done enough waiting. So far all they'd done was wait. "Then I'm going to go take a dump,” she stated.

  "You can't smoke in the bathroom," Preston argued.

  "Right, you said that. Anyone else wanna take a dump with me?" she asked, patting her purse. She had two takers, friends who could always be counted on to lend her a puff when she needed one.

  She also had one tagalong.

  "I can walk down the hall if I want to," Preston noted with a childish air. He stayed eight paces back, escorting them all the way to the bathroom, whereupon he leaned up against a wall next to the door. "I can lean here," he said at their look. “It’s a free country.”

  "What you're doing is really close to stalking," Morgan noted. One of the main reasons she had taken the job with R&K was that she had been working as a data processor for eighteen years and was heartily tired of it. She was looking to sue somebody for something and the fact was R&K was loaded and could afford a sexual harassment suit. She'd even read up on the subject and knew that documentation and witnesses were the key to entrapping someone with harassment.

  "I'm not stalking anyone I just like to lean here. It's not my problem that it just...happens to be..." His words faltered as a fresh indignation caught his eye. A person had just walked out of the central stairwell door. "Is that one of the patients?"

  "I think so," Morgan answered. "He might be leaving, and that's against the rules. Why don't you go harass hi
m?"

  Preston stalked off, thinking to do just that. "Hey! You can't leave!” he yelled. “We're under lock down. That's..." Again his words ground to a halt. The person had turned his way and there was something not quite right about him. Black orbs seemed to have replaced his eyes and there was a viscous goo leaking all down his face. What was worse was how he had turned at the sound of Preston's voice; he had done so with naked aggression.

  "You need to get back upstairs," Preston said, with less of an imperious tone.

  He was ignored. The man neither turned left nor right, he headed for Preston with his mouth wide open, clearly looking to take a chunk out of him. Preston didn’t wait to be bitten; he punched the crazy looking man square in the jaw. Preston might have been officious and a tad overbearing but he could fight. His raw personality made it almost mandatory.

  And yet the blow, delivered with all the righteousness he could muster, didn't even faze the patient. And neither did the next punch, or the one after that. The man just kept coming on, stupidly with his mouth agape. Preston focused too much on the gaping, hungry mouth and didn't realize there was so much danger in the man's outstretched hands. The fingers were like talons and once they got a hold of Preston's sweater they would not let go.

  The man pulled him into his embrace and it was everything Preston could do to stop those blackened teeth from tearing into him.

  "Help! Shit, fuck! Morgan, help get this guy off of me." The patient was so strong that he easily wrestled Preston to the ground and was bending back his arms in order to get to his soft throat. Morgan and her two friends tried to help.

  "Get off!" Morgan yelled, kicking the patient with the toes of her shoes. One of her friends joined her, stomping with wicked stilettos, while the third woman picked up a three-hole punch and started beating the man on the back of the head. Preston was going spastic, screaming and writhing, kicking his legs uselessly as his head was bent further and further back.

  Preston knew what was coming—the crazy man had already bitten him on shoulder, the cheek, and his right ear, which was torn in two and dangling by a membrane of skin. He was in intense pain and there was blood flowing, urgent and hot, but he knew it would be nothing compared to what would happen if the deranged patient could get to his neck.

  And yet there was nothing Preston could do to stop him. He was weakening and all he could do was scream in anger and fear...and then in pain. It was an awful, terror filled sound.

  At the cry, Morgan stepped back uncertain what to do. Blood ran like water out of Preston’s body. It darkened the tan carpet, leaching outward, quickly. It almost seemed to her that the blood would soon spread under her feet to cover the entire corridor in red. As she took a fearful step back, Preston's cry turned into a wet gurgle and his hands suddenly shot out, frozen in a rigid posture. They stood out like that for half a minute and then dropped with two little thumps.

  "Oh, shit," the woman with the three-hole punch said.

  The lunatic made a slurping noise as though he was sucking up milk from a bowl when the last Cheerio had been fished out. Then he took another, larger, bite out of Preston and shook his head like rat-terrier. Something...some part of Preston, flew up and slapped onto Morgan's wrist. She couldn't tell what it was. It slid off when she turned her arm over, leaving a wet stain behind.

  "Oh, God," Morgan whined, shuddering and backing away. The other two women did the same, tiptoeing, not wanting to disturb the crazy patient, not wanting him to look up and see them, not wanting to suffer the same fate as Preston. At the edge of the cubicle maze, they turned and fled, running as if there were a dozen more lunatics after them.

  There actually were. The sound of Preston's screams had attracted every one of the patients who had wandered down to the first floor and now they were converging on the three women. When Morgan saw them she kicked it into high and sprinted for the break room at top speed, yelling: "Open up! Let us in!" She had this insane fear that the break room was going to be locked when they got to it, unfortunately, for all of them, there wasn’t a lock on the door.

  Jodi Schmelling opened the door and stood blinking in confusion at what she saw. Morgan plowed right through her and the other two women trampled them both. "Lock it!" one of them screeched.

  Instead, Dean Redman looked out over the admin area. At the sight of the black-eyed monsters rushing the door, he jerked as if an electric eel had chomped down on his testes. "Oh, shit!" he cried, slamming the door practically in the face of one of them. There was an immediate crash as a body smashed into it.

  "Lock it! Lock it!" Morgan yelled. "They killed Preston."

  "Who did?" Jodi asked. Dean was staring down at the doorknob in disbelief, his mind seemingly incapable of grasping the concept that not all doors had locks.

  "Some guy,” Morgan cried. “One of the patients from the trial. They did something to them and now they’re like..." The door banged again and the wall shook.

  "There's no lock," Dean said. He turned slightly and pointed at the knob. "It's got no lock."

  "We can barricade it with the sofa," Jodi said. "Everyone move out of the way. Someone give me a hand." Jodi, who was normally quiet as a mouse, began commanding the others. They hopped to. Both couches were stacked one atop the other in front of the door, while the heavy chairs were pushed into supporting position on either side. They also armed themselves with whatever was available: one man held a coffee pot as though it was a hammer, another had a mug, a third had a broom.

  Morgan took out her cell phone and she punched 9-1-1 with shaking hands. After a minute of near useless questions and hysterical answers she told the others in the room, "They said it would be fifteen minutes. We should be fine, right? Those things haven't even tried the doorknob yet."

  Everyone looked at the knob. It hadn't turned. The patients were hammering on the door with unrelenting fury, but the knob hadn’t even been tried yet. It was a fine door for what it was made to do: opening and closing, and perhaps offering a modicum of sound privacy. It did not possess a solid core and had not been constructed to act as a first line of defense.

  After a minute, a crack opened up on the hallway side and soon the repeated blows turned the crack into a gaping hole. The beasts tore at it in maniacal rage and then they began to attack the near side panel. The door got a sudden reprieve when they heard someone talking from the other side.

  “It’s the CDC!” Jodi cried upon hearing Vince Oldham. There was a cheer from the trapped admin workers and then as the screams began on the other side of the door there were only tears. Soon the door was back to being hammered on and after five minutes the trapped employees could see the death that awaited them as the door began to fall apart.

  When it finally came apart, they tried to hold the couches in place, but the top one toppled over. Jodi then ordered the men in to attack with their "weapons". The coffee pot lasted a single swing, the mugs shattered on first contact and the broom snapped in two--they had gained three minutes.

  2

  Six miles away, New York State Troopers Heines and Brown were racing their cruisers at breakneck speed. They had spent the last three hours motoring along the narrow back roads east of the Hudson, trying to track down a single man: John Burke. That sort of thing was the dullest of police work and both were glad for the break.

  "Say again, dispatch?" Brown said into his mike. His wipers were slapping back and forth and, combined with the rain and the roar of his engine, he was having trouble hearing. "Is this a terrorist attack?"

  "We're trying to make some sense of this, Charlie-6," the dispatcher said in her usual, bored as hell voice--nothing ever seemed to get her excited, not even the possibility of a terrorist attack. "We advise caution until the situation clears up."

  "Dispatch, this is Charlie-Sierra-5, we roger that," Heines affirmed. "Possible gang or terrorist attack. We'll be judiciously cautious."

  Brown snorted. Judiciously cautious meant Heines was going to do whatever he felt like doing and talk his way o
ut of any trouble later. The man had a silver tongue that Brown envied. He glanced at his GPS and was shocked to realize he recognized the address. "Dispatch, is this the hospital that's under quarantine?" he asked into his mike.

  "Just a sec, Charlie-6," the dispatcher said. She was away from the mike for a couple of minutes; when she came back on she still didn't seem all that concerned. "That is affirmative. A research fellow just put a call into us. You will be facing a biohazard of unknown origin. There are CDC agents on the grounds. Make contact with them to receive any follow up directives."

  "Already a cluster fuck," Brown snarled to himself. Heines pulled up beside him, glanced over, and shook his head. "Yeah, I'm right there with you," Brown whispered. The idea of Ebola or small pox or any of those nasty diseases, was one of those threats police forces simply hated. You couldn't shoot a virus, you could only pray you weren't going to come in contact with some of that nasty shit.

  The hospital came up too quickly for Brown's tastes. It looked shiny and new, an unlikely spot for terrorism, however the gate was unmanned and there was a dead body in the CDC van sitting out front.

  "Holy shit," Heines said, staring in at the remains while rain water fell off the brim of his campaign hat, what all the troopers called smokeys. Beneath it, his lip was curled in disgust, making his caterpillar-like moustache poof up as though it was about to crawl off his face. "Call it in. I'm going to check the lobby."

  Brown had been staring at the body feeling the starch drain out of his uniform. It was a moment before he could turn away from the sight of Damon's partially eaten corpse. "Dispatch, this is Charlie-6." Even in his own ears his voice sounded like someone had tweaked his testicles something good. "We are on site and request back-up and ambulance support. We have one CDC personnel deceased."

  "Roger, Charlie-6. Do not touch the body. I say again do not touch the body. We are routing extra units in your direction."

  "Out," Brown said. He glanced up at the hospital, feeling his insides do a little dance. He didn't want to go in. First, the germs and now the CDC man...something had torn great hunks of flesh out of him; it had looked as unnatural a death as Brown had seen in fourteen years as a state trooper.