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

by Peter Meredith

  “I’d rather not be picked at all,” Stephanie said. “But I also don’t want to get turned into one of them.”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Singleton,” Thuy said to Chuck. “You get first pick.”

  As they divided into groups, she turned away to stare into the elevator shaft. She squinted into the dark until a pale light streamed from behind her to light up the shadows. It was Anna holding up her cell phone.

  “I’ll be picked last, if I’m picked at all,” she explained.

  “Do you blame them?” Thuy asked.

  “Yeah, a little. I’m in the same boat as the rest of you. If Von Braun makes it up here it won’t be like I’m immune or anything.” The light dimmed and Anna touched the surface of her cell phone to brighten it again. She saw Thuy’s wide eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m allowed to have it. That idiot Deckard gave it back to me. He said: It’d be stealing if I kept it. He’s like a pretend cop. I know he’s hoping I use it to call my contact or whatever.”

  “Seems smart to me,” Thuy replied.

  “Yeah, except I don’t have a ‘contact’ and if I did I wouldn’t be stupid enough to use my own phone to call him. That’s the problem with Deckard playing cop. Whatever evidence he comes up with will be illegally obtained and not admissible in court.”

  “Clearly you would have made a better a lawyer than a scientist,” Thuy said, acidly.

  “Well, one way or another we’ll all be looking for a new career tomorrow…if we live to tomorrow. That’s why I’m helping you. I admit I’m not a fighter and most of your people aren’t nearly as brilliant as they’d like to believe.

  “And you are?” Thuy asked. When Anna smiled, suggesting she was, Thuy said, “Show me. How do we stop the elevator from coming up here?”

  The blonde swung her hair across her left shoulder and then eased closer to the shaft, shining her cell phone light up and down the walls. After a few moments she said, “We can cut the cable. We’d first have to fashion a saw from metal…”

  Thuy spoke over her, “Von Braun is already late carrying out his attack. It could happen any minute now. Meaning we don’t have time to be fashioning tools like a caveman.”

  Anna’s smile disappeared and her lips drooped at the edges, making her look like fish. “I don’t know…maybe we could set a beam or something at an angle down in the shaft that would block the elevator from...”

  “Do you see any spare beams lying around?”

  Now Anna glared. “So, you’re just trying to be vengeful? Figure it out yourself.”

  She turned to leave but Thuy grabbed her arm. “I have already figured it out, I was just trying to see if you had a better idea. Dr. Riggs, may I borrow your knife, please?”

  Slowly, Riggs brought it out and was even slower handing it over. “That’s my only weapon.” He was like a child being asked to give up a favorite toy.

  “I need it to hold the elevator. You understand.” It didn’t look like he understood. It looked like he had been suddenly rendered impotent. To Anna she said, “Point your light across from us. See those concrete rings sitting one on top of each other? Those are the counter weights for the elevator car. When the elevator comes up, those go down. What I need you to do is wedge this knife right up against the rail underneath them.”

  “How? How am I going to reach that far?”

  Thuy squinted into the shaft as if expecting to see something more than darkness. She then shrugged and answered, “You climb.”

  Anna looked down; the shaft was midnight black. It could’ve been ten feet deep or ten thousand, there was no way of telling. She backed into Thuy’s hand. “No,” Thuy said, holding her there just inches from the edge. “You’ve admitted you can’t fight and you’ve proven you aren’t up to snuff when it comes to problem solving. I hope you can contribute to our dire cause with the simple act of climbing, something any second grader could do. It won’t be that difficult. There are a couple of handholds, and you can put your feet on that little pipe.”

  After a long moment, when Anna realized Thuy wasn’t really giving her a choice, she said, “Alright. I’ll do it, but just to show you that I’m on your side.” She handed over the phone and accepted the knife, which she stuffed down the front of her blouse where her full breasts and her push-up bra held it in place.

  She reached out for the first hold with the cell phone light full on her shaking hand. It almost seemed like Thuy was mocking her by showing each hold and then pointing out how frightened she was by letting the light linger on her quivering hands. She was dreadfully slow. Anna gripped every hold as though she was never planning on letting go. It made her palms slippery, which only added to her fright.

  Finally, she made it to the counter-weight at the back of the shaft. “Just stick it up there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Thuy replied. “Wedge it up as far as it will go and hurry. If the elevator starts now…”

  Anna knew. She shoved the hunk of metal as far up as it would go and then hammered on it with the palm of her hand. When it wouldn't go any further she said, “I did it. That thing is stuck up there good.”

  “Problem solved,” Thuy said. “The potential energy of the weights shouldn't be able to overcome the friction generated by the knife against the rail. We should be safe now. You can come on back.” Thuy guided her with the light until Anna reached the first corner then unexpectedly she turned the cell phone off.

  “Hey!” Anna froze in place.

  “Before you come back, I need to know what you did,” Thuy whispered. “What did you do to the Com-cells?”

  “Th-This isn’t f-funny,” Anna stuttered.

  Thuy was secretly pleased at the obvious fear. “What you did to the Com-cells wasn’t funny either. Lives are at stake here, Anna, and more importantly to you, at least, is that your life is now at stake.”

  “I-I didn’t do anything,” Anna insisted. “Please, you have to believe me.”

  “I don’t,” Thuy said, through clenched teeth. Standing, she reached up and touched a small lever at the top of the elevator door. It held the doors open when maintenance needed to do repairs. “I’m going to shut the doors now and it’s going to get very dark. You won’t be able to see where the handholds are and eventually you’ll grow tired and fall.”

  “Dr. Lee, please,” Anna begged.

  “I’ll open the door only when you tell me what you did.”

  Anna shook her head. “I didn’t do anything. But…if…if you want me to say I spied then ok I’ll say it. I spied on your research and sent coded messages on to a professor at Cornell. Ok? That’s all I did. I didn’t do anything to the Com-cells. I swear.”

  Thuy had expected just this: admitting to a crime that she had already been fingered for. “I’ll be waiting just outside when you’re ready. I wouldn’t be too long if I was you.”

  “Dr. Lee! Thuy, please don’t.” Anna’s face was a pale oval and her eyes little glints of light. Thuy was moved to pity—she struck the feeling down. There were lives at stake, it hadn’t been just a cliché. Besides, she knew Anna would talk.

  “Sorry,” Thuy said, and then hit the lever.

  2

  Four floors down, Von Braun was hooking up another bag of Diazepam with fingers that felt like they were made of wood. He had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs trying to figure out how to make his threat of killing everyone into a reality. Unfortunately the stairwell doors on the fourth floor had stubbornly resisted every attempt he and the other zombies had made to open them. So far they had tried pushing and pulling. When that didn’t work they tried pushing and pulling really, really hard. He had a few tools at his disposal but not a crow bar or an acetylene torch.

  Von Braun found himself out of his ideas, except the overarching idea that he had to get up there and find the cure. He hated the scientists who, he was sure, were laughing at him, but what he hated more was that his head was filled with such horrors that even he, one of the most loathsome humans on the planet, couldn’t stand it.

>   It was like hell had hatched in his mind. He needed blood. He craved it. He wanted to bathe in it and he needed to drink it. The fresher, the hotter, the better.

  As he was sitting there grinding his teeth and hating everything about humanity, a police officer came limping around the corner. The bag of Diazepam dropped to the floor, forgotten as he rushed at the officer intending to rip his throat open. Three steps away, Von Braun stopped in his tracks. It wasn’t the gun pointing at him that halted his feet. It was the smell.

  The man smelled like shit. There was nothing clean about him. His skin wasn't dusky with the spores yet and his eyes weren't black, but he still smelled nasty. Von Braun turned away in disgust and, remembering the Diazepam, he shuffled back to the stairs where he slammed himself down. He fumbled for the bag.

  “Get out of the way,” the officer demanded. Behind him were thirty others. They stank, as well.

  “The doors are locked,” Von Braun said. Finally, he got the Diazepam hooked to his IV. The relief was instantaneous. It doused the fires of his mind and he was able to regain more of his mental abilities. He looked up to see the cop staring at him.

  “You can talk,” Heines said, squinting. His vision was beginning to fade and yet he could see Von Braun’s black eyes plain as day. “But you’re one of them.”

  Von Braun grunted. “I think you mean you’re one of us. All of you stink. Can’t you smell yourselves?”

  “Like shit,” Morgan whispered.

  “You’re one of us,” Von Braun said again. “But the doors are locked at the top where they are. That’s where I need to go, where I have to go, but the doors are locked.”

  Although Heines’ ability to think was quickly fading, he still had his training ingrained in him. “I can get us through a locked door," he said, picturing what he needed: the hammer. He remembered Brown used to say: ‘It’s hammer time’ whenever they had to breach a door. There was a little dance that Brown would do as well only just then the memory of it was just out of reach.

  It nagged at him, haunting him deep in the last clear area of his brain. “Something about how I couldn’t touch it,” he whispered. “And there were pants…” The memory worried at his mind until he was forced to give up on ever recalling it.

  “Wait here,” Heines ordered the others. He began lurching toward the way out and as he passed through the front doors he almost stepped on the body of his partner, Wendell Brown. He didn’t notice and wouldn’t have cared if he had noticed. Like the dance move, Brown was already fading from his memory.

  But he still had his training.

  When he reached the cruiser, he ducked in out of the rain and stared about its interior, again trying to recollect what he was doing—the hammer and the cure. Those were the two things that were important. The first thing he saw when he popped the trunk was his trusty twelve-gauge. Heines ignored it completely. The second thing he saw was the hammer. It was a twenty-pound breaching ram that had never met its match against any door.

  He stuck it on his shoulder and slowly gimped his way back. The rain drenched him, but, surprisingly, he didn’t feel the cold, nor did the gaping wound pain him. For the most part, he was numb both inside and out….unless his brain was taken into consideration. That mass of grey crap was still pounding as if the top of his head were just about to shoot off.

  Von Braun watched Heines struggle with his wound and the weight of the ram, but he did nothing to help. Heines was a cop, a state trooper to be more precise. Von Braun could remember hating cops more than anything. “You a cop,” he accused when Heines got back.

  This was the last thing Heines had expected to hear and the only answer he could come up with was, “Huh?”

  “That badge means you’re a cop,” Von Braun said, poking him in the chest. “It means you’re one of them. One of the ones who did this to us.”

  “I'm not! I don’t have the cure,” Heines shot back.

  “You’re their guard dog.” Von Braun stood in Heines’ way. That the thirty people gathered all around the cop had far more to do with the clinical trial didn’t enter into Von Braun’s thinking at all. They looked like dull, middleclass, business types; it was as far as his mind could go in that direction. But the cop was different. He represented authority, a hated concept that was deeply ingrained in Von Braun.

  And in this case authority meant he was one of them. One of the people in power. One of the people he hated. Heines might have the smell, yet his look wasn’t right. He wore a badge and that was definitely wrong.

  He reached out and snatched the badge off the trooper’s chest. “This is what tells me…”

  Heines smashed him in the chest with the ram and then proceeded up the stairs. Behind him came the admin workers. They ignored Von Braun who lay gasping for breath, and they ignored the other full on zombies, who smelled horrible: there was no salvation in their blood.

  For the most part the zombies ignored them right back, though every once in a while, one would turn, see the clear skin, and attack. These attacks were always short lived and didn’t amount to much. One taste of the diseased flesh was enough for a zombie to know it wasn’t pure and quickly they would spit out the mouthful.

  Heines slogged upward. The stairwell was littered top to bottom with lab equipment, shattered glass, tables, desks, chairs…it was like an entire office had been poured down the stairs. It made for slow going, yet he was determined.

  At the top, a dozen zombies were pounding on the door with their fists. The skin of their knuckles had long ago worn away and blood sprayed with every strike.

  “Out of the way,” Heines commanded. When they continued to pound, he reached up and began hauling them back from the door. Morgan and Jodi helped, throwing the zombies back down the stairs, heedless of who they landed on.

  “Morons!” Heines yelled after them when he saw the door handle. “You’re supposed to pull.” He tugged the handle and when it didn’t budge, he yanked harder, screaming, “Come on! Open you fuckers!”

  The others tried to crowd him to get at the door, but he pushed them back. “No. The hammer. It’s hammer time.”

  He hefted the ram and then sent it crashing against the metal door making a noise like thunder. It echoed throughout the building in a long wave that caused people to jump.

  On the third floor, Dr. Hester heard it and made a little whimpering noise. A floor above, Deckard heard it and had his gun drawn in an instant. Thuy heard it and understood exactly what it meant: Von Braun was attacking! She made a split second decision and threw herself between the closing elevator doors. Anna heard it, panicked and lunged for a handhold, desperate to escape. In the dark she missed the metal bar.

  3

  “Anna!” Thuy screamed. Forgetting everything, she dropped to her belly and had just begun searching the dark with the cell phone when the doors closed on her waist. She groaned in pain and had to force her knee up at an odd angle to keep from being pinched in half by the heavy doors.

  Another crash rippled through the building. Von Braun is coming! The frightening thought made Thuy want to up and run, however just then she heard a ragged, whiny breath from somewhere below her. Thuy turned the cell light toward the sound and saw Anna clinging to the side of the elevator shaft by one hand.

  She was trying to reach for another handhold but she was too weak and couldn’t pull herself up. “Dr. Lee…help…me.” She was straining to hold her grip yet her fingers, even as Thuy watched, were slowly pulling back.

  “Hold on,” Thuy pleaded. It might have been the single dumbest thing she had ever said, but just then she wasn’t using much of her brain. Her fear over Von Braun had been multiplied by the two thundering crashes and now, added to that, was her fear of Anna falling to her death. She was having trouble thinking straight.

  The light in her hand shook and jitterbugged as it panned over Anna. The woman blinked and Thuy realized she was again being stupid, blinding her uselessly. She roved the light all around Anna as another boom shook the buildi
ng. The vibration seemed to go right to Thuy's chest and shake her heart.

  “Your right foot!” she cried. “There’s an electrical conduit right above it. There…just lift…yes!” Anna used her foot to lift herself just enough for her left hand to find a hold. “Good job,” Thuy said. “Now, move your left foot a few inches out…”

  “Dr. Lee!” Stephanie Glowitz cried, running up to the elevator doors. She started to pull Thuy out from between them.

  “Stop,” Thuy yelled. “Anna’s down here.”

  Stephanie dropped Thuy’s ankle. “We need you. They’re breaking through the central doors and no one knows what to do.”

  Thuy hesitated caught by indecision. Anna saw it, she hissed, “Don’t leave me, please. Dr. Lee, damn it, you did this to me! You can’t leave me!”

  Guilt and fear tore at Thuy. Another of the crashes tipped her in favor of fear. “I’ll be right back, Anna. Just hold on. It’ll be ok.” She squirmed backward and the doors began to close.

  “No!” Anna screamed. “Don’t leave…” The doors shut, cutting her off.

  “You can’t worry about her,” Stephanie said, hauling Thuy along by her lab coat. “She brought this on herself and…and I’m sure she’ll be fine.” Stephanie had no idea if she would be or not, nor did she really care. She only knew that there were forty or fifty zombies trying to tear down the stairwell door. The scientists called them infected persons; everyone else knew better. Those things were zombies, pure and simple.

  She also knew that fear was making everyone reactionary. Only Thuy seemed to have been able to keep any wits about her.

  Stephanie dragged Thuy out into the hall where they found everyone standing in a semi-circle around the stairwell door. They wore blue surgical masks and latex gloves; all the protection that was available. The men were in front. In their hands was a mishmash of pathetic weaponry: two held brooms while three others had mops; Dr. Wilson had Thuy’s desk chair raised and ready, Eng had a couch cushion held in front of him. Leading the group were Deckard, Singleton and Riggs. Behind them were the women, cringing at each of the loud crashes, and looking ready to bolt.