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

by Peter Meredith

  Gerald stepped back; he could feel his pulse in his ears. “Were you in the building?”

  Guilt didn’t sit well with Foster’s frame of mind; it was like blood and water. No, that wasn’t right. It was like blood and…more blood. “No,” he said aloud. The CDC people were staring at him like he was some sort of freak; that wasn't right either. “No, I mean yes, but I was geared up. And it wasn’t just me. Trooper Paul was there, too, and he’s just fine. Just fine.”

  “But you were in the building,” Gerald pressed.

  “Don’t you read the fucking reports?” Foster snapped. “I’m sure I forwarded them on to your office.”

  “I don’t read them before I come on scene, they color my judgment. And I’m especially glad I didn’t tonight, otherwise I would’ve probably missed the opportunity to see you in this state.”

  “What state?” growled Foster.

  “There’s clearly something affecting your mental faculties, Sergeant. I’m afraid we’ll have to add this tent and everyone you’ve come in contact with to the quarantine list.”

  “You can’t do that…” Foster stopped as he remembered that this CDC jack-hole could quarantine him. It was well within in his powers because he was one of them. Foster didn’t know just yet who they were, still he had Gerald pegged.

  “If I’m staying, you’re staying,” he said, getting to his feet.

  Gerald wasn’t about to be blustered by this police underling. “Wrong. We will keep a safe distance from the other…” In the middle of his sentence, Foster launched himself at Gerald, who squawked like a bird and tried to leap back. Too late. Foster had him by his tweed lapels and together they went sprawling.

  The CDC agents tried to help but Foster was too strong and in seconds Gerald was flat on his back. Foster sat square on his chest and sneered, “You’re staying with me, Mister High-and-mighty, Mister Perfect.” Gerald wanted to cry out for help, but when he opened his mouth, Foster spat something foul right down his throat.

  3

  Thuy looked at the phone in disbelief. “Say that again. The CDC agents that just showed up are now part of the quarantine?”

  “Yes,” Courtney Shaw replied, tiredly. “We’re still trying to sort things out, but we will be moving to rescue you as soon as possible.”

  Courtney had no clue when it would happen. Not only had the CDC agents quarantined themselves, they had also quarantined eighteen other officers. She was, in effect, losing men faster than she was getting them on scene.

  “Look, ma’am,” Thuy said. “The doors won’t hold forever. You have got to make the attempt very soon. Do you understand? We don’t have anything to fight them with.

  “I would like to help. I really would, it's just we don’t have the manpower.”

  Thuy’s whole body slumped. Deckard, leaning against the wall, asked, "What’d they say?” When she told him he took the phone from her and barked at the dispatcher, “How can you say you don’t have enough manpower? We can see the cruisers from our windows. There’s got to be at least sixty of them out there. That’s more than enough for a rescue. Just have the officers come in with guns hot. Don’t play around.”

  “It would help if we knew numbers,” Courtney said, biding time and thinking on the fly. “We can’t seem to grip on just how many people we’re dealing with. Do you know?”

  “I don’t,” Deck replied. “Somewhere north of two hundred and fifty, but that’s counting the family members in the cottages. They number about, I don’t know, sixty. I think our worst-case scenario is there are about one hundred and seventy five of these zombie things to deal with here in the hospital. Just remember they may be strong but they aren’t armed.”

  “And they really can’t be killed?” Courtney asked, in a whisper. The official policy was not to give any credence to the idea of zombies, however these people so clearly believed it that it was unnerving to hear.

  “Not that I can tell,” Deck replied, his voice also set low.

  Courtney checked her board again. Not counting the eighteen officers stuck in quarantine, she had fifty-six manning a perimeter a mile and a quarter in circumference. It seemed more than enough to her but the CDC agent on site wanted triple that number. This left nothing for an assault on the hospital.

  And if those zombie things couldn’t die, would fifty-six really be enough anyway?

  “Can I call you back?” she asked. “I promise I will.” Deckard grunted, his way of agreeing, involuntarily.

  Courtney dropped her head set and stood, about to go see Pemberton when Renee grabbed her hand. “It’s going to shit, Court,” she said. “Poughkeepsie wants their officers back. Their dispatchers are going crazy over this massive brawl at a bar and from what I can tell they only have, like two or three officers left.”

  Courtney didn't need to look at her board to see they couldn't afford to lose nine men. "But we need those officers here, did you tell them that?"

  “Of course, but they were like, we need them, too, and we need trooper support. And I was like, what troopers? I mean, look at the board.” They had scoured the countryside for every available state trooper within two-hundred miles and now there was nothing left.

  “Did you try Kingston?”

  “Yes and Red Mills. We have all their extra men, which is like two.”

  Courtney forgot all about her promise to Deckard. She sat back down and shoved her headset back on. “I’ll try Hyde park and Milton. You try Highland and Myers Corner. Beg them if you have to. Have them bring in their off duty officers or their wives or whatever. We’ll send half to Poughkeepsie and the rest need to come here.”

  In Walton, Deckard and Thuy sat in her office, waiting. Every once in a while their eyes would meet. They couldn’t bring themselves to speak of trivialities anymore. The central stairwell door was failing. Deckard had inspected it: the hinges were loose, they could go at any time, which meant they couldn’t risk using the propane again. Too large of an explosion would bring the door down, leaving them defenseless.

  He made a single attempt using the gas line as a flamethrower and had managed to torch one of the zombies at the cost of melting off two feet of hose. That trick would only work once more before the hose would be too short to even reach the door.

  “What do we do?” she asked. He shrugged.

  They were still sitting there after ten minutes when the lights went out. Thuy leapt to her feet. “Von Braun,” she whispered. In her gut she knew he was behind it.

  4

  Anna clung to the side of the shaft and knew two things: her strength wouldn’t last another five minutes, and Thuy had it in for her. Even if she managed to hang there until Thuy got back, her fate wouldn’t change all that much. At best, she could expect to be hauled up into the corridor and then later hauled to jail. At worst, Thuy would keep playing her sick games not realizing that Anna was innocent of what she was being charged with. Innocent or not, she'd still fall very soon.

  With her choices being between dying and going to jail, Anna chose to try for a different option. Her left hand had the weakest grip, she let go and began feeling further down the wall for a better one. In the dark it came up against something smooth and cool. Whatever it was had a narrow lip, barely enough room for the tips of her fingers. It would have to be good enough. Next she scraped her left foot down the wall until it caught on some unknown piece of metal. It was small, like the jutting of a bolt. There wasn't much to it, still it held her weight.

  Her right foot found something similar, then it was her left hand's turn, again. She began searching, blindly, however the wall had suddenly become smooth.

  "Oh shit!" she whispered. Desperate, she began reaching further and further out as her right hand began to tire. It started as a little tremble in the fat muscle of her palm, but soon the weakness invaded her slim little fingers and then her wrist.

  She redirected her hand upward hoping to find the old hold, but it seemed to have disappeared in the dark. A wild thought struck her: Jump for
the cable! "Hell no," she said through gritted teeth. The darkness was so impenetrable that she had no clue where the cable was.

  "Help!" she screamed at the top of her lungs. "Riggs! Dr. Lee, please!" Her voice echoed around the shaft but failed to penetrate the cement walls or the steel doors. Seconds passed without any answer. She was alone in the black, clinging to what felt like an endless sheer wall, disconnected from everything else in the universe. It began to feel as if there wasn't anything in the deep black but that lone wall and that she could stretch out her arm twenty feet and still not feel anything else.

  A miserable whine broke from her throat as she began to stretch her arm to its limit. Her fingers found metal. Recklessly, she clung to her holds by the edge of her manicure nails and explored the metal as best she could. It was vertical and smooth. Her mind pictured either a fireman's pole, which made no sense, or some sort of guide rail for the elevator car.

  Either way, she knew she was seconds from losing the precarious grip of her left hand. She gave her life up to chance or fate--but not to karma. Anna didn't want to think about the negative balance of karma on her soul. Trusting to luck she "jumped" from her perch; it was a jump of six inches; all she could manage in her position.

  Her hand found the metal rail and discovered that at four inches in width, it was too big for her to grab one-handed. She scrambled at it but failed to find purchase and as she fell down the shaft a scream built in her throat. The darkness sucked her in and she didn't feel the metal zinging by against her left hand until it stopped her short.

  It wasn't a miraculous save like one sees in the movies where the heroine finds herself clinging to a hold and looking up, desperate, but still beautiful. No, what stopped her fall was that the fingers of her left hand had hit a bracket holding the rail to the wall and became wedged in the metal.

  The pain was exquisite. It hurt too much for screaming. She began to kick and flail at the wall until her feet found another bracket four feet down. Whimpering like a puppy, she lifted her weight off her mangled hand and pressed her cheek against the metal rail. It was then she cried. The tears were useless. She knew that and she had always given herself a lot of credit for being tough, but just then she was frail and weak. Her hand ached beyond the telling, especially when she tried to bend her fingers. Then the pain was like fire.

  She had saved herself, but now she felt trapped, in too much in pain to go up or down. She wept miserably in the dark, her small feet set on two slag bolts and her right hand gripping the rail on its thinner edge. She cried until there came an explosion from up above. Its violence moved the air in the shaft like an ocean wave and a second later she felt a thrum go through the metal pressed against her cheek.

  "Shit," she hissed, gripping the metal as hard as she could. Either Thuy or Von Braun had done something. One of them had made a bomb out of who knew what. "It had to be Von Braun," she whispered. There simply wasn't anything left in the labs to cause that big of an explosion.

  She didn't like the thought of Von Braun having the capability to blow things up. What if he took down the entire building next? It might be something he'd do if he couldn't find the cure.

  This fear was the catalyst to get her moving again. Using the strength in her right hand and the three good fingers of her left, she was able to shimmy awkwardly down the rail, moving in four-foot increments, using the heavy metal brackets as hand and foot holds. It hurt like a bitch and she sweated fear out of every pore but, sooner than expected, she found herself standing on the top of the elevator. Her knees gave out and with a light thump, she dropped onto her bottom.

  "I made it. Yes, I made it," she said to herself, grinning in the dark and shaking from head to toe. "I can't believe..."

  A moan from below her stopped her tongue, making her realize that, yes, she had made it down the shaft, but that didn't mean she was in the free and clear. There were still an unknown number of zombies between her and the exit, and after that there were a bazillion police. And, even if she got past them, there'd be the prosecutors to deal with. They'd be out for blood. Someone would have to be blamed for everything and if the real saboteur wasn't caught, assuming there was one, they'd try to pin everything on her regardless of the fact that she had barely done anything wrong.

  The most she could honestly be accused of was a little light spying and a single instance of theft. In her bra, under one of her heavy breasts was a vial of "the cure". The night before, back when she thought the damned stuff would work, she had switched out a single vial of the Com-cells that would have been used on John Burke. He had instead received normal saline. The real vial was for the nice people from France who, she assumed would pay her handsomely for it. She had carried it around ever since, at first because it was too valuable to set aside and now because...she didn't know why. In the back of her mind she thought: Just in case.

  She hadn't known what Just in case meant until she was sitting right on that elevator. "Just in case I want revenge," she whispered. She promised herself that she wasn't going to jail even for corporate espionage. She was more terrified of being locked up than she was of a world full of zombies and they had her pretty much dead to rights. The hard drive Deckard had waved around had to have been stolen and thus wouldn't be admissible in court, however all the emails that she had sent from her own computer would be. Legally speaking, she was screwed...unless...

  Anna's karma took a hit as a new thought struck. She stared upwards into the dark, not seeing the elevator shaft, but picturing the lab where Deckard had interrogated her. Even if she got rid of the vial, all the evidence needed to convict her was four stories up, and all the witnesses too.

  Without the paper trail, or the hard drive, and without Deckard and the others pointing fingers her way, the prosecutors wouldn't have any reason to even suspect sweet, innocent Anna. She just had to think of a way to destroy all of it. "The zombies will eventually kill them," Anna mused, "only that would leave the evidence intact. But,” and here her eyes narrowed, “a fire would do it. A big fire would take care of everything."

  She sat back picturing it and for a time the throbbing in her hand went unnoticed. Fires weren't as easy to set as most people supposed, especially in this modern day of glass and steel buildings. Yet, Anna knew, these buildings were built around a skeleton of wood. There would be plenty to burn, it was simply a matter of getting a fire going and sustaining it.

  "If only I had access to the labs," she said, pursing her lips. The dark hid the fact that she was subconsciously striking one of her "poses." As a teenager she had experimented with how she looked under different hues of light and in diverse poses. She practiced those which drew the most attention from the boys--even at a young age she was well aware of the effect she had on members of the opposite sex.

  There, in the dark, even with a smudge of grease marring the perfection of one cheek, and her hand mangled and bloody, she was striking. This did her little good, alone in an elevator shaft, however she wasn't a one trick pony. Her beauty was a blunt tool; her mind was a fine instrument, which few could match.

  She set her mind to the problems of starting a fire. First she created a mental catalog of the fourth floor labs--for the most part the paraphernalia was of a bio-chemical nature and, although she could've started a fire with some of it, it wouldn't be big enough to burn down a house let alone an entire hospital, and yet there had been an explosion.

  "Think, damn it," she hissed to herself. "How do I start a fire without gas or...holy shit!" She began to grin. "I have gas. The release of propane in an enclosed space would account for..."

  A sudden string of gunshots jarred her out of her thoughts and brought her back to the present. It was the sound of Sergeant Foster and his men being ambushed. Like everyone else in the building she held her breath, listening, her full lips hanging open. Unlike everyone else she was rooting for the zombies—if the police won through, she’d be screwed.

  When the firing stopped, she sighed in relief. Out of those left aliv
e in the building, she was the only one not blinded by hope. For her it was clear that the rescue had failed. She could hear the screams of the troopers as they were eaten alive. It was a sound that shivered her, but instead of causing her to give up the plan of burning down the building, the screams cemented it.

  Anna rationalized that death by fire was far preferable to death by zombie--she'd be doing Thuy a favor by burning down the building.

  As Foster escaped, alone, out into the wet night, Anna began the task of finding a way down into the elevator car, without the use of her sight and with only one hand. She was delayed a half hour when Thuy opened the door on the fourth floor and set Stephanie, Chuck and Burke to keep some sort of vigil over Anna’s supposedly dead body.

  It wasn’t much of a wake, and the three of them didn’t say much about her “passing” besides such sayings as Good riddance and She was a bitch, anyway. The words drifted down on Anna like hot, bitter ash, and when the three finally tired of their watch and shut the door, Anna went at the elevator hatch with even more eagerness than before.

  There were two bolts holding the hatch in place. They were tight. Her fake nails snapped off one by one and then her real ones began to crack and peel back. Eventually, persistence paid off, the bolts gave way and the hatch swung down. A sharp, white light shot up, filling her with hope. The first thing she did was to inspect her aching hands: the right one was cut in a number of places and the nails were ugly, but otherwise unhurt in any lasting manner. The left wasn’t as well off. Her pinky finger was cut to the bone near the base. Above the laceration the finger was dislocated or broken and went off at an obscene angle as did the ring finger next to it. The pain made her nauseous and the blood...

  She wasn’t one for blood. It was the reason she’d chosen the field of study she had. Because of the possibility of infection, the Com-cells being the most fearful in her mind, she had to glove the mangled hand. That meant she would have to straighten the fingers. Acting quickly before the fear of more pain could set in, she grabbed the two fingers, pulled them out and then up.