“What?” he demanded.
“Kilo-8 is on site and is awaiting orders.”
“He has his orders.”
“Are those orders to rescue the people trapped on the top floor? Their last communication was that they were being attacked. Someone was trying to bash down the door with a ram.”
“A ram?” Pemberton asked, feeling his stomach drop. The word “ram” suggested something he didn’t want to consider, yet the idea strode his consciousness nonetheless and demanded to be addressed. “Any word from Brown or Heines?”
“Nothing.”
“How long has it been?”
“I haven’t heard from Brown since they entered the building over two hours ago. It’s been forty eight minutes since Heines last checked in, and he was…strange.” She tried on a smile but it was crooked as a dog’s leg and only showed that she was embarrassed to repeat what had been said. “He called me a whore and then blamed us for leaving him there and for keeping the cure from him. Those scientists I've been talking to said there’d be personality changes.”
Pemberton breathed out the word, “Right.” He had known Heines for years; the man never complained about anything and certainly never cussed out a dispatcher. “You think he’s got it? The disease?”
She tried to shrug noncommittally, but he read the “yes” written across her features clearly. “Ok. Get me Foster.” Courtney put the call into the onsite commander and a minute later Pemberton was talking to Sergeant Foster, a man he’d once duct taped to a toilet to keep him from puking all over his carpet. A man he’d stood next to at the altar on his wedding day. A man he’d attended so many funerals with in the course of a twenty-year career. A man he trusted.
“I need to know exactly what’s going on in that damn building. I need to know if they’re really eating each other and who, if anyone is still sane.”
“Are you suggesting a recon in force?” Foster asked. “I don’t have much of a force. I have only ten troopers including myself and six local-yokel deputy dogs.”
“Yeah, it's what I'm talking about. We're flying completely blind here, and...and I need to know what's going on with Heines and Brown. They're good men. Split your people. Leave half to man your perimeter and take the rest with you. Remember, try to keep contact at a minimum and also, everyone needs a mask. I’m talking a real mask.”
The state police only had gloves and surgical masks, neither of which engendered much of a sense of protection. They would have to borrow gear from the emergency units. Foster snorted. “The EMTs and the fire-tards won’t be happy.”
Pemberton didn’t care if they were happy or not. “If anyone won’t give up their equipment, deputize them and make them come with you inside.”
This had Foster chuckling. He knew that not a one of them would come along. He didn’t question their courage, he only knew they had the courage of backcountry emergency workers who were accustomed to cleaning up after car crashes, wetting down a burning house every once in a while and dealing with assorted felines stuck up in trees. Then there were the parades and the school functions that had to be attended, and of course they had to make time to strut about for the local gals whose bodies were like soft bowling pins and who saw a man in uniform less as heroic figures but rather a man most likely to conform.
Foster had known many of these country emergency workers. They wore their uniforms much the way a peacock wears his feathers—they would fold them in the second things got rough. He wasn’t wrong. The locals huffed and puffed, staging hysterics strictly for each other’s benefit, but when push came to shove and he threatened to deputize them they handed over their equipment just like that.
While the emergency personnel began hauling out the protective hazmat suits, Foster looked over the men he had to work with. He decided to go with size as his main criteria. From many years of experience he knew that even people who were high or tripping, or drunk, usually respected a man if he was big enough.
For this reason he chose four of his troopers and the three sheriff’s deputies from Middleton who were huge both in height and girth.
He chose incorrectly.
Middleton had not yet made it into the twenty-first century: the three deputies had .38 caliber police specials on their hips, meaning that after six shots they’d be dry. Worse, not a one of them had ever reloaded their pissant little pistols under pressure, nor had they trained to do so. In their sleepy little burgs there had never really been a reason to.
“Let’s get buttoned up,” Foster barked. Under the watchful eye of the emergency workers, the eight men donned the protective gear. Foster was so concerned over the thought of germs and the integrity of the suit that he didn’t realize that he had safely encased his weapon in plastic. It was germ free but useless, otherwise.
“Shit,” Trooper Eddie Peels said when he realized the problem. “Our guns.” Some of the EMTs started chuckling while the troopers all looked at Foster. Peels asked. “Is it too late? Do we leave them where they’re at?”
Foster felt the ache of time getting by, however he wasn’t about to go up against crazed infected cannibals without a gun at the ready. “Let’s get them out.” None of the men made a fuss. As the men struggled out of there suits, Foster went over what he expected to encounter, “We’ve all read about people on bath salts and some of us have had run-ins with people on PCP and meth, supposedly what’s going on with the people in there is worse, so if we have to take any of them down, we do it hard and fast.”
The men grunted or nodded, thinking they knew the score already. When they were ready, Foster formed them up, making sure to put the three Middleton men on his left where he could keep an eye on them. He led the way, sweeping through the abandoned gates and advancing on the brightly lit hospital. Rain pattered on their plastic hoods and coursed down their plastic suits in tiny rivers. It streaked across their face shields making them even more unrecognizable to each other. Foster knew the Middleton boys because their gun belts were different and because one of them had foolishly pinned his deputy badge to the outside of his biosuit. His own troopers were strange, alien looking blobs with guns at their sides.
“Hold,” Foster barked as they came up on the CDC van. He glanced in, expecting to see only a corpse—it should’ve been a corpse. The man lying across the front seats looked as though a lion had gorged itself on his intestines. He was torn open across the middle, blood was everywhere, spattering the glass and the console and soaking into the seat cushions.
Still he wasn’t dead.
Damon turned his head, ever so slowly, to stare at Foster. He started gnashing his teeth. “He’s trying to say something,” Foster said, waving his gloved hand to quiet the troopers who were gathered around. “Step back.”
Foster opened the door. “It’ll be alright, sir. Don’t try to move. Just lay back.” Damon had turned on his side and was trying to kill, but he was too weak and Foster ignored the hands scraping at his plastic biosuit. He also ignored the black goo dripping from Damon’s eyes and nose, mistaking it for old blood. “Just settle down and try to tell me what happened.”
Damon snapped his teeth and groaned in hunger and frustration.
“Can you hear me?” Foster asked, holding the man’s hands down.
“He ain’t hearing shit, sarge,” one of the troopers said. That was true enough. Damon was solely focused on reaching Foster with his teeth and tearing out his throat. To the troopers, he seemed so far gone that he didn’t appear to be much of a threat.
“Paul?” Foster asked. “Which one of you…”
“Right here,” one of the alien blobs said. Jared Paul had been three years into a medical degree before he grew bored with school and traded in his books for a gun. Paul squinted from behind his face shield at Damon. “There’s pretty much nothing I can do for him.”
“Stay with him,” Foster said, weakening his crew. "It's not right to leave someone alone to die like that."
Now it was only seven men who advanced on the lo
oming hospital. At the front doors, Foster pulled his weapon; the others followed suit. Just through the glass he could see the body of a state trooper; the face was too torn up to be recognized. There were three other visible, living beings walking around the lobby; they didn't look right either. They looked like they should've been dead, too.
"Let's go," Foster said.
One of the troopers opened the doors for the others. The seven rushed in guns leveled and began to fan out. Foster stopped at the trooper's body—there was no need to check for a pulse.
“Who is it?” one of the troopers asked.
“Wendell Brown,” Foster replied. The corpse's face had been eaten off but his nametag was shiny and looked new.
“Shit,” the trooper said.
“Yeah,” Foster agreed in a whisper that didn’t make it through the respiratory filters on his suit.
There was little time to mourn. “We got incoming!” one of the Middleton boys hissed. Two people were shambling at them—they were horrors. Blank faces, black eyes, wide, gaping mouths.
“That’s the disease?” someone off to Foster’s right asked. “What is it? Legionnaires?”
“It’s not Legionnaires.” Foster had arrested a junkie who’d somehow contracted Legionnaires; whatever this was, it was far worse. He held up his free hand. “Stop where you are! I said stop or we will be forced to detain…shit! Take them down.”
The pair, Anita DeSota, one of the recently deceased cafeteria workers, and Mr. Mumford, charged straight at the law enforcement officers, ignoring the seven guns pointing their way. Neither of them was large but both were surprisingly strong and vicious, using their teeth as weapons. They weren't subtle about it; they led with their mouths open and snarling.
The troopers were not caught unaware, but still, it took two men to wrestle each down to the ground and a third to actually cuff them. “That was crazy,” one of the troopers said. He was breathing heavily and a fog kept whisping across his mask with every other breath. The seven stood over Mumford and DeSota, watching as they bucked and grunted, trying to get at the living in spite of the cuffs pinning their arms behind their backs.
“Check your suits for any rips or tears,” Foster ordered. Their suits, though streaked with the infectious black mold were whole and intact.
“What do we do with them?” asked the Middleton deputy who had pinned his star to his chest. He had been in the thick of it, struggling with Mr. Mumford, and now he was taking in spores through those twin holes every time he sucked in a breath.
“We leave them for now and get them on the way back,” Foster answered. He too had been surprised at the ferocity of the two rather small and unassuming individuals, and he wasn’t about to further weaken his crew by leaving someone to watch over them. “Let’s take this floor room by room, nice and slow. The troopers will have point, the deputies will watch our six.”
“Wait, where did the other one go?” one of the Middleton boys asked. “There was a third dude. Where’d he go?”
Everyone craned their heads around, trying to see out of the little clear windows in their masks. Other than the twitching body of Earl the security guard, there wasn’t anyone around. “Forget about him,” Foster said. “If he’s anything like these two, he’ll show himself sooner or later.”
2
Von Braun wasn’t like Anita or Mr. Mumford, at least not yet. He still had three bags of Diazepam left. “Three bags to find the cure,” he whispered.
After Heines had cracked his sternum and he had been trampled by the admin workers rushing up the stairs, Von Braun had wandered into the lobby breathing like a broken accordion. His one thought was of revenge. He decided he would gather an army of his own and take the cure from that fuck-wad of a cop. The one problem was that the lobby was practically empty with only two morons wandering around.
He tried to gather them to his cause, but they kept wandering off and soon he became confused as well. His brain was a mush of hate—there were simply too many people he wanted to hurt: the cop, the gook, the nigger. And there were others. He remembered, barely, that his lawyer had been an asshole who had to die. And then there was Johnny Carew from the fifth grade...
“I gotta kill that fucker, too.” There were more and Von Braun found himself staring at the distant flashing lights of two dozen emergency vehicles as he dwelled on all those he wanted to kill with his bare hands. The lights captivated him and, like a deer in headlights, he stood at the tall windows that made up the walls of the lower floor and simply stared.
Von Braun gazed blankly through the glass doors until he heard the explosion on the top floor that rattled the building. He then stared upwards for a full minute before a thought blinked into his brain, “My cure!” With the black goo draining from the ducts in his eyes, running was difficult. He stumbled like a drunk over to Mr. Mumford and Anita and began to shepherd them to the stairs.
They were annoyingly slow and easily distracted. They didn’t understand that the cure was in danger, in fact, it seemed to Von Braun, they didn’t understand anything. “Get up there you fat fuck!” he screamed at Mr. Mumford, pointing at the stairs where the smell of burnt flesh was overpowering. Had it been clean flesh Von Braun would have left the two and run to gorge himself, but the flesh had the underlying stink of shit which made his stomach turn.
Mumford hesitated in the doorway, growled and then scratched at his eyes, tearing off a piece of his eyebrow. Anita turned away. Von Braun was thinking of killing her when he caught movement through the glass doors—the police were coming.
There were many of them, too many for him to count, but not so many that they couldn’t be overcome. “Go get them,” he said, turning Mumford around. Mumford didn’t need to be told twice. His brain was a black hole of misery, however he knew fresh meat when he saw it. He and Anita went after Foster’s little force and Von Braun went for reinforcements.
In the little wedge of grey matter that was still operating he knew it would take lots of his kind to bring down so many cops. His stomach rumbled hungrily, thinking about it. As he climbed the stairs he encountered others and these he turned them around to point down stairs yelling into their ears, “The police are down there. Go get them!”
He sent a constant stream down. When he reached the fourth floor he came on a dozen beings that no longer looked human. Their skin was black and ragged, their skulls burned down to the bone, but still they pressed onto the door and beat at it with hands that were little more than fused bone. Von Braun tried to get them to go after the police as well, but they could smell the fresh meat of the scientists and nothing was going to dissuaded them from getting through the door.
Von Braun went back down to the third floor, rounded up another twenty or so and sent them downwards. They had been feeding on the newly killed. The six people trapped in the CAT Scan room, not understanding the breadth of the problem, had tried to make a break for it. They hadn't got far. Von Braun paused only long enough to take a bite from Dr. Hester's lukewarm corpse--the meat wasn't hot which meant it wasn't good.
Spitting it out, he went to the south stair and began pushing more of the zombies toward the first floor. It was then that the first gunshots began to rattle the air.
“Hurry, fuckers!" he screamed at the slow moving zombies. "There won’t be anything left!” All told, eighty infected people were heading for the seven officers.
3
The troopers were surveying the bloodbath in the first floor break room when the first of the infected people broke out into the lobby and began wondering around. They could smell fresh meat but they couldn’t pinpoint where the sweet odor was coming from. With their hoods stifling sound and cutting off their peripheral vision, the troopers were oblivious to them.
Foster was very glad for the concealing plastic. Yes, it kept the germs out but it also hid the fact from the others that he had gone a shade of green. He had never been to any crime scene that was comparable to what lay in front him. It was more than just the blood.
All over the floor were ugly hunks of flesh, long strands of hair still anchored to flaps of scalp, and a number of fingers. He counted eight, but no thumbs. There were also seven bodies, only one of which was actually dead. The rest were like the CDC man in the van, mostly dead. Most had been torn apart by something with vicious teeth and an eternal hunger, but a few sported gaping holes caused by a nine-millimeter handgun.
"Where's the rest of them?" One of the Middleton boys asked.
"Maybe Heines is trapped upstairs," Foster answered.
The deputy shook his head. "No, I meant, where are the rest of the dead?" He pointed at the ground. Amid the blood and the pieces of stray body parts were thirty-nine brass casings.
Foster stared all around, realizing that the deputy was right, the numbers weren't adding up. With so many shots taken, there should have been a couple of dozen bodies. Something caught his eye. There had been so much blood that he hadn't noticed it before. "Drag marks," he said indicating the floor where black streaks ran through the red. The color didn't make sense, but he had seen the telltale marks of a body having been dragged away enough times to know what they were.
They followed them out into the admin area to the nearest cubicle, fully expecting to see a pile of corpses, instead, there were just two, again grasping, half-dead creatures that made their stomachs churn.
"It looks like they just walked off," someone said. "How? How do you get shot up and then walk away like it was nothing?"
"And where did they walk off to?" another asked, quietly. The men were more like frightened boys. They clumped together, facing outward ready to shoot the nearest shadow if it looked menacing enough.
"We should've waited for the CDC," a deputy said. "We should've sat tight like the rule say. We..."
"Shut your fucking lip!" Foster snapped. "We still have a man in this building, not to mention there are civilians trapped upstairs. Now, let's do our fucking jobs."
The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One Page 24