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

by Peter Meredith

  He took off his Smokey and was wiping the sweat from his brow when he saw Heines waving at him urgently from just inside the lobby. "Shit," Brown whispered before ducking into his cruiser. In the glove compartment were latex gloves and surgical masks. He donned them as quick as he could, grabbed an extra set for Heines, and then ran for the front doors. One step in and he understood what Heines was so frantic about.

  There were screams coming from deeper in the building. "Put these on." Brown shoved the mask and gloves into his partner's hands and then took off at a run. His body was charged with fear but he couldn't ignore a cry for help, being the good-guy was simply too ingrained in his psyche to run from danger. The trooper ran into the admin section, staying low, pausing where the cubicles formed little hallways.

  At each turn, he poked his head out, glanced back and forth and then ran on, faster. The cries drew him on until he found the source: a room near the end of the building. Its door was in pieces, hanging from bent hinges and there were what looked like claw marks on it.

  His first thought: What the fuck, is there a bear in the building?

  Brown ran to the door, weapon drawn. What he saw inside shocked him into inaction. It was a wild melee. Thirty or forty people were battling with hands and feet and in many cases with teeth! There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the fight, only the result: death. Blood coated the floor, dripped down the walls and was spattered across the furniture that had been uprooted and now pointed at strange angles that made not a lick of sense.

  Some of the people fighting were dressed in hospital gowns, some in surgical scrubs and others in business attire--most were women. Brown had never seen a brawl like this between such normally mundane individuals and it was a few seconds before he bellowed: "Everyone freeze!" Amid the grunts and growls and the blood-curdling screams he went unheard.

  Heines came up beside him and his eyes went comically large over the top of his mask. "Mother of God, what the fuck is all this?" he asked.

  "Who the hell knows," Brown replied. "I guess we should try to separate them, somehow. Let’s just start grabbing them and pulling...shit! Look at her."

  One of the brawlers, a woman with graying hair, had been kicked square in the chest by a spectacled man in a button up shirt. The blow turned the woman around and now the two troopers were looking the hideous woman square in the face. The entire orbs of her eyes were black as coal--Like a demon, Brown thought.

  She was covered in a smear that resembled ink. It seemed to leak from every orifice except from her mouth. Her mouth was wide and gushing blood that was just as bright red as Santa's coat.

  "Kill her!" someone screamed.

  But she's unarmed, Brown was thinking. Regardless, his weapon came up. In response, the woman spat out a hunk of something onto the floor that had once been part of a person's face. "That--that's a nose," Heines said in disbelief.

  Brown believed it, just like he believed that what was held in the woman's right hand was a tangle of hair and at the end of it were the still bleeding remains of someone's scalp. "Stop right there," Brown ordered. She didn't. She oriented on Brown's voice and came at him with her mouth stretching wider still as though she would swallow him whole if she could.

  "Do it," Heines said. "Plug her."

  Brown put a hole in her chest, nine millimeters in diameter. Other than jarring her back a step, it seemed to have zero effect. He shot again; the second shot was as useless as the first. "Mother fucker," Brown hissed and pulled the trigger a third time. The last bullet passed through the fourth intercostal space and spun at a shallow angle before blasting out her vertebra. With her spinal cord cut she dropped like a ragdoll.

  "Mother fucker," Brown said, again in a whisper.

  "Yeah," Heines agreed. He pointed into the room with his service piece. "Look, there's more of them." With all the commotion and the blood and the screams, the faces of the fighters had blurred together, but the canon-like gunshots had paused the fighting and the people came into focus. There were ten others with the black eyes.

  "Should we try to cuff them?" Brown asked. Killing that first lady had unsettled him mightily and although the others seemed as mindlessly violent, he didn't think he could just shoot them out of hand.

  Heines shrugged. "I don't know if we can. But we can try."

  The two officers charged into the fight and in seconds they realized that handcuffing was not an option. They wrestled one man down to the ground, however he was all gnashing teeth and rending claws. He was also fiendishly strong and somehow got atop of Heines and was within a whisker of tearing out his throat when Brown shot him. Just like the lady, it took three shots before the man slumped.

  With a grunt, Heines threw him off. "Forget the cuffs!" he yelled, getting to his feet. In a terrific rage, Heines strode into the battle and began shooting without regard for anything that resembled proper procedure. There seemed to be little choice. The "normal" people were losing the fight. Many were pouring blood from gaping wounds and a few were stretched out on the floor, unmoving.

  Stunned, Brown just stood there watching Heines blasting away, until he saw one of them come up behind him. Then Brown reacted and put two into it, in quick succession. After that he joined what some would've considered a mass execution if only any of the crazy looking people had actually died. The bullets did their thing: tearing through muscle and bone, ripping apart organs and vessels, spraying blood everywhere, but the black-eyed creatures came on and on, regardless. They took their awful punishment in unholy silence. A few times a single shot would do the trick, but generally it took three or more to bring them down. Still, none of them actually died. When they dropped, they would continue to crawl at the troopers if they could or stretch out grasping hands, or just lie there growling, snapping their teeth.

  When the grisly work was complete, or as complete as Brown and Heines could make it, the room was eerily quiet. There were a few tears and sniffles, and one poor woman who'd had all the fingers on her left hand bitten off was rocking back and forth, moaning, but other than that the room was shrouded in a stunned silence.

  "An ambulance...we should...we should get an ambulance," Brown said with a stutter affecting his tongue. He felt hollow through and through and his fingers had lost all sensitivity; he couldn’t feel the gun he held in a death grip.

  “Hold on, will you?” Heines asked, putting out a shaky hand. He was gasping for breath and staring all around with wide eyes. “Just give me a moment to think.”

  “Your mask,” Brown said, pointing with his pistol.

  Heines touched his face and felt the blue mask that had slipped cock-eyed from his mouth. He put it back into place and then looked at his gloved hands: they were wet and black. “Is that stuff on me?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Brown said.

  “Shit. You got some on you, too. Right above your eye. No, don’t touch it. We got to call this in and tell them that we…that we might be infected, too.”

  Brown began shaking his head as if denial were a strong component of a plan. “We don’t know if we’re infected. We don’t even know what’s going on.” He looked around and his eyes fell on Morgan. “You, Miss, what’s wrong with these people?”

  “They have cancer,” Morgan answered.

  “Cancer that comes out of their eyes?” Brown asked, feeling a little madness begin to creep around the edge of his reality. To counter it he tried to rely on his training. “We should call an ambulance.”

  Yeah,” Morgan agreed. “We gotta get out of here. There’s more of them.” The other admin workers all agreed to this. Some of them were bent over their injured co-workers trying to help in what small way they could, while others had backed to the corners of the room to be as far away as possible from the black-eyed creatures who were still struggling, however pathetically, to get at the living.

  “But we’re still under quarantine,” Dean Redman said. This silenced the room again. Everyone stared around in fright, wondering if he was right.

&n
bsp; “It’ll be ok,” Brown said. “We have guns, and we can get back up. You’ll be safe.”

  “I’ll call it in,” Heines said. Without waiting for a response he began stepping gingerly towards the door. The floor was covered with the dead and the ghastly creatures that couldn’t seem to die.

  “Wait,” Brown said, sharply. The madness inside him hadn’t retreated a lick. It felt like it was growing inside his brain and was even then slipping under the lid of his realism.

  Heines paused, expectantly, however Brown could only think of selfish things like running out of the room as fast as he could, or begging to be the one who got to call in the attack. He was deathly afraid that either he had already been infected or that he would be if he stayed one second longer. He was fearful of taking too deep a breath. And yet he was no coward. He bit back on the madness. “Have them bring lots of ambulances,” he said.

  “Right. Good idea. I’ll make sure they bring four or…” Out of the blue, Heines cried out and pitched forward.

  For a split second, Brown thought his partner was infected and actually took a step back, fear overriding his thinking. In truth, Heines had already been infected, they all were, however his issue was more acute. One of the crazy people they had gunned down had lurched forward, and grabbed hold of the cuff of Heines’ starched uniform. Its mouth gaped and before Heines knew what was going on the infected person had bitten into his lower leg severing his Achilles tendon.

  The pain was magnificent. It was fire and ice raging up the back of his leg and right up his spine. A scream that put all the other screams that day to shame, tore out of his lungs. Brown had never considered himself much of a quick draw, yet his service pistol cleared his holster in a quarter second. He fired at a downward angle into the monster’s head and blew brains and a good deal of blood onto the carpet.

  The creature, who had been Dakota Oswalt earlier in the day, was the first person to actually die in the Walton facility since Ray took an unlucky bullet to the back of his head. The others: Paolo and those massacred on the third floor, Vince and the CDC people, Preston and Earl, weren’t as dead as they seemed. Even then some of them were beginning to twitch. The Com-cells had never stopped reproducing and the stem cells within them healed at a rate no scientist could have believed.

  When the scream had run its course, Heines said through gritted teeth, “I’m fucked.”

  “No, you’re not,” Brown insisted. “Let me see.” There was an outrageous chunk missing from the back of his ankle. “You’ll be fine,” Brown lied after swallowing loudly. “Let me just get these fuckers out of here and then I’ll get you that ambulance.”

  “What about us?” Morgan asked.

  “You’re not even hurt,” Brown snapped. He stood and surveyed the room. “Those of you who are hurt will get an ambulance. The rest of you, drag these things out of here.” He showed them how by grabbing one by the ankle. Ineffectually, it tried to turn itself around to get at him. “Just keep out of reach of its mouth and you should be fine.”

  He hauled it out into the corridor and then as soon as he saw some of the survivors helping he left them to call his dispatcher. Brown jogged back to the front lobby and stopped just at the end of the admin section. There were more of the black-eyed people wandering around the lobby.

  “This is the sickest,” he said, before changing out the clip in his weapon. He knew that if any got within five feet of him he would shoot first and not stop to ask questions.

  “Here we go,” he whispered, psyching himself up. With a deep breath, he ran for the doors. Two of them saw him and shambled after. They were quicker than he expected and he thought it safest just to shoot them: two into the one on the left, three into the one on the right. Brown then turned and ran for the doors where another was simply standing there squinting and turning its head like a curious dog. He brought his gun up to drop this one too, but it spoke.

  “Don’t shoot,” it said and then raised a hand.

  Brown was so surprised he almost jerked off a round accidentally. He slid his finger off the trigger. “Ok, man. It’s going to be cool. I’m going to call ambulances for everyone. I won’t leave you behind.”

  The creature had a name, though he barely remembered it even with the Diazepam dripping into his veins. The hate in his brain was like one long explosion that drowned almost everything else out. “Ambulance? For me?” Von Braun asked. “What about for them?”

  He pointed behind Brown, who turned. At the last second, when he felt the barrel of a gun jab into his spine, Brown realized he had fallen for the simplest trick in the book. Von Braun pulled the trigger and there was an ear-splitting retort and then a strange combination of pain and numbness within Brown that flooded outward in waves from the point of impact.

  Brown fell and Von Braun descended on him with his mouth wide like a modern day Dracula. The blood was good and fresh and it made Von Braun feel alive and, for a few minutes at least, clean.

  3

  Thuy had not meant for the questioning of John Burke to feel like an interrogation. She had also meant for it to take place in private, instead twenty of the twenty-three people trapped on the fourth floor were arrayed around the man in a semicircle. Thuy ordered everyone to leave, however Milner pointed out that she no longer had any authority and that if she wasn’t fired the second Kip and Rothchild heard about the fiasco, he would quit.

  “Why don’t you go call them while we take care of business here,” Deckard advised. His hard tone and his cold eyes left no room for misinterpretation: Milner would leave or Deck would throw him out. Having already been punched, Milner made a quick getaway.

  “Her, too,” Thuy said, pointing at Anna. Thuy knew she may not have authority over the others but there was no way she was going to let that traitor bitch stay. Anna left without making a scene, which was wise, since the other scientists were glaring at her harshly. “Riggs?” Thuy asked. “Do you mind keeping an eye on her? I don’t want to even think about what sort of mischief she might get into if she were left alone.”

  “Is there something going on with her?” Stephanie Glowitz asked. She could barely keep herself propped up on Chuck’s shoulder. It had been a long, disappointing day for her—first being late, then finding out that there wasn’t a cure after all, and, lastly, the hard work of helping to fill up the stairwells with anything she could carry. She was coughing again and the ache in her chest felt like she had swallowed a nine-volt battery that had gotten lodged behind her sternum.

  "Anna did all this," one of the scientists declared.

  "We should throw her down the stairs," another demanded.

  “Everyone quiet down,” Thuy snapped. “We aren't going to throw anyone down the stairs. And if you wish to stay, you need to shut up. Now, so far, Mr. Burke you are the only one immune to the negative effects of the Com-cells and there has to be a reason why. I need to know everywhere you’ve been in the last two weeks, and everything you’ve eaten, everything you drank and everything you snorted or shot up or whatever.”

  “Everthin’?”

  “Start with yesterday,” Thuy said.

  It lasted twenty-five minutes and not one of those minutes went by without someone asking a follow up question—Did you have any sauce with that? What did you take your pills with? When did you go to bed?

  Thuy charted everything from what motels he had stayed in, to what cars he had driven. Just then it felt like a waste of time, but there was no knowing what the information would mean when more facts were in. In the middle of Burke’s questioning there came the sound of more gunshots from lower in the building. It was Heines and Brown in the break room; the mumbly bangs went on for close to a minute.

  Milner came running in. “They’re shooting downstairs!”

  “No shit,” Chuck drawled.

  John, who was happy not to have everyone staring at him for once said, “It’s prolly the police finally done showed up.”

  “Maybe you should call the State troopers and see if they
have any new information,” Thuy suggested to Milner. “And find out what’s going on with the CDC. Their agents should have been here ages ago.” When he left, Thuy ignored the whispering that had sprung up and went back to grilling Burke.

  Eventually, no one could think of anything else to ask John. In the quiet that followed, Stephanie said to Thuy: “You never really answered me, what was with that lady? What did she do?”

  Thuy gestured to Deckard who replied, “What we know is that she’s been slipping information concerning the Com-cells to one of R&K’s biggest competitors. We have email confirmation of this.”

  “That’s what we know,” Thuy said. “What we’re very sure of but can’t prove just yet, is that she also sabotaged the trial somehow. What’s happening to those people isn’t anything found in nature. It couldn’t have just happened by itself.”

  “And you’re just letting her go about free?” Stephanie asked. A small part of her was happy that she had dodged a bullet concerning the sabotaged trial, another part was furious that someone would do something like this. “She should be…someone should…I don’t know what, but I’m mad as hell. This was my only chance.” Tears sprang into her eyes and she put her hands out to Dr. Lee as if begging. “If you find out what went wrong, will there be another trial?”

  “Maybe,” Thuy answered, not meeting her eyes. “But if there is, I won’t be heading it and it won’t be in time for you two.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Chuck said. He had a very slow fuse, but when it was lit it stayed lit. “Someone should do something.”

  Again Thuy and Deck traded looks and she again nodded to him to answer. “There’s nothing more we can do until the authorities get here and take over the situation. Everything will come out eventually, I’m sure.”

  “Not in time for all those poor people in the stairs,” Stephanie said. “And not in time for us.”