Crawlerz: Book 3: The Mountains Are Calling

by R. S. Merritt

  Harley swung towards them like an overweight Robin Hood. They caught him by the legs and pulled him in. He unwrapped his hands from some kind of knot he’d made in the rope and unfastened his belt. He’d wrapped it around the rope as a backup evidently. Falling to the ground he crawled into the suite and collapsed. Up above the gunfire went fully automatic. LeBron leaned over and almost got hit in the head by a flashlight that tumbled off the balcony. Shining his own flashlight up he saw Gus edging over the side of the balcony above him.

  A smashing sound as the slider above them was knocked off its tracks. The broken glass door tumbled off the balcony. Shards of glass rained down all around them. Gus went over the edge backwards with a crawler riding him in the middle of a glittering rain shower of glass. Their flashlights illuminated the sparkling particles as Gus plummeted past them. Yue saw Gus purposefully let go of the rope. His eyes closed tightly and his lips moving as he rocketed past them. He was either cursing or praying as he fell. Knowing the passionate Marine, he was probably doing both. A crawler was still attached to him. It was riding him like a remora riding a shark into the depths.

  Then he was gone. Drew walked over to stand beside Yue in shock. They’d shared a ton of time and experiences with the Marine since they’d first met him. Drew was having problems standing because of the pain in his arms and back. Harley was still lying on the floor gasping for breath. Everyone else was as well as could be expected after being tied to the end of a rope and tossed off a balcony.

  “Come on. Let’s see if this floor is any safer than the other one.” LeBron was working to pull everyone away from the balcony. There’d be time later to mourn Gus. Right now, they could best honor him by staying alive.

  Chapter 26: Requesting an Upgrade

  They lay around a musty dark room recovering in pained silence. They’d checked the hallway and hadn’t seen any infected on this level. The fire escape didn’t line up right with each and every window. With everything that’d happened that night LeBron couldn’t remember if there’d been a platform lined up with the window on this level. Harley had been the one standing down there the longest. Harley thought there was a window there, but the fire escape covered a portion of it.

  The infected would be slamming themselves into every possible part of the building to try and get at them. They were ripping the carpeted floors of the rooms above to shreds. The solid concrete floors the only thing keeping them from continuing to dig down. Even the balconies outside could be used by the crawlerz. They didn’t care about rope. Most of them would end up as piles of bloody bones and skin on the sidewalk down below. A few might actually make the leap onto the adjacent balconies. Once there they’d be able to prowl the floor until they found the group of uninfected humans cowering in this room.

  “We can’t stay here.” LeBron announced.

  “Where are we supposed to go?” Lisa challenged him. She’d thrown her arms up and given him a nasty look when she said it. She realized almost immediately that was a bit over the top. She was saved the embarrassment of apologizing since no one could see very well in the dark room. The one flashlight they’d left on was pointing at one of the walls. Little specks of light magically floating around in the tight beam as it cut a tunnel through the dusty darkness.

  “We have to go up.” The wheels in LeBron’s head were back to spinning at full speed. The death of a friend had reminded him of the high cost of not staying ahead of the game.

  “Like to the roof?” Yue asked. He must be back on his roof kick. She’d kind of hoped he was over that idea. It may be a good idea on a nice night in the middle of nowhere with an easy to access roof that had a heavy-duty lockable door up top. How often were the stars going to align to offer up something like that on a nightly basis wherever they happened to randomly end up at though?

  “Maybe. If we end up that high. I’m thinking we just need to get up to a floor the fire escape doesn’t reach.” LeBron responded. His plan made sense now that he’d said it out loud. The exhausted group reluctantly got to their feet to figure out a way to hobble up a few more floors. Each of them aware they were living on borrowed time on this floor.

  “Out the door and check the stairs?” Drew asked. It was really more of a rhetorical question. It wasn’t like the elevator was running. If the infected hadn’t infested the stairwell yet, then they’d be able to easily skip up a few floors to the penthouse suite. Drew walked towards the door to the suite to open it and head out.

  Something started pounding on the door from out in the hallway. A few seconds later there was a similar pounding on the wall beside the door. Their brief respite in the room had given the crawlerz enough time to figure out they could get through the window off the fire escape to close in on their prey. This new development left them with nothing but options that sucked. They could bounce down another level by ‘Tarzanning’ to the balcony below or they could say screw it and try their luck in the hallway. A third not so great option was to try and secure the room they were in.

  Staying in the room would just delay their deaths by maybe twenty minutes. Swinging down another level sounded suicidal. There may already be an army of infected waiting for them a floor below anyway. There was a nice big window on that floor leading to the fire escape as well. There was realistically only one choice. Time to roll the dice. Drew hesitated long enough to look behind him. Everyone was nodding at him to go for it. Everyone he could see anyway. It was pitch black except for the flashlight beams which were all directed straight into this eyes.

  “I’m going to open this door and start shooting. A soon as I see a path forward, I’m taking it. We get to the stairs and we go in. I’ll open the door to the stairs. Yue and Lebron go in first and make sure it’s clear. Once everybody’s in Harley and me will follow you and secure the door. I’ve got a couple grenades I may toss out. Ready?” Drew asked in a deadly serious tone. He was busy blinking as much as he could to try and regain the night vision the bright flashlights had stolen from him.

  Without waiting for an answer, he made sure his rifle was where he could reach it and pulled his pistol out of its holster. He had no idea how you were supposed to open a door when a crowd of flesh-eating freaks were knocking on the other side, so he just opened it and stepped back. A quick thought flashed through his mind that either Gus or Mikey would’ve probably been trained on the proper way to blast your way out of a room like this. Knowing them they’d have insisted on a rapid escalation to the maximum amount of violence they could visit in the small area.

  The infected man on the other side of the door was tall, skinny and had surprisingly long luxuriant looking hair. He was caught off balance trying to smash into the door when Drew had opened the door. He looked like he’d just taken a step back to try and ram the door again. Multiple other bodies were visible milling around outside trying to press on the wall and door. Drew shot the skinny guy with the shiny hair and slammed the door in the other monster’s faces. Thinking about Gus and Mikey had given him an idea.

  “I don’t know why I was saving these for the stairwell. Everybody down! LeBron you cover me. I’ll toss the grenade out there.” Drew shouted over the noise of the renewed banging on the wall and door. Drew popping into the open doorway had taken the rage of the small mob outside the door up multiple notches.

  “Are you sure about this?” LeBron asked stationing himself in front of the door. Yue was behind him shining her flashlight so they could see. Harley was standing bent over behind the two. He was still in pain from the jump. Drew took the pin out of a grenade and gripped it tightly in his right hand. He held his pistol in the other. He realized he had no hands to open the door with so shook his head in Yue’s direction.

  Yue handed off her flashlight to Lisa and opened the door. LeBron went full auto on the wall of flesh standing in front of them. Drew pitched the grenade over the heads of the ones trying to get in and screamed for Yue to shut the door. Unfortunately, too many of the crawlerz were pushing on it for that to happen. There
were also all the dead ones laid out on the ground in the doorway. LeBron kept pulling the trigger as he walked backwards. He was doing his best not to shoot Yue or Drew. If he happened to kill a crawler that was a bonus at this point. Considering how many were outside the door he didn’t see how he could possibly be missing.

  Flashing back to his earlier thoughts around how they needed to plan better he wondered how they’d let themselves get here in the first place. The live grenade in the hallway outside the door they couldn’t shut wasn’t going to end well.

  The grenade exploded. The explosion in the confined space was loud enough to reach into their ears and rip out their ability to hear. LeBron felt a piece of shrapnel hit him in the shoulder. He spun in a half circle and fell to his knees. He wanted to scratch it out. It was a hot, searing pain. Blood bubbled up and covered the front of his chest and shoulder. He sat down and held his hand over the blood. He looked around the room dazed by the explosion. He couldn’t hear anything.

  Drew picked himself up off the ground where he’d jumped on Lisa to shield her from the blast. She’d been backing up to get away from the doors when she’d tripped over an end table and fallen to the floor. She’d been trying to make sure Drew and the others had a light to see by. Drew was yelling as he got up. No one could hear him since they were all temporarily deaf. Those who hadn’t had the sense knocked out of them struggled to their feet to follow him out the door.

  LeBron shakily pointed his rifle in the general direction he thought the door was in. He started fumbling around trying to find his flashlight. Being deaf and blind in a building filling up with things trying to kill you was getting really old really fast. Especially when one of those things was his moronic grenade throwing brother. A beam of light from someone else’s flashlight lit up the room. LeBron gave up on finding his for now. They had to take advantage of the window of opportunity the grenade had bought them. It wasn’t going to last long.

  Yue was laid out on the floor by the door. Seeing that everyone else looked to be in bad shape Drew bent down and scooped Yue up onto his shoulders. They didn’t have time to make sure she was ok. It wasn’t like it was the first time that Yue had been knocked unconscious. It wasn’t even the first time that month. That couldn’t be a good thing to keep happening to her. Not that it’d matter if they all ended up being eaten alive in the hallway in the next couple of minutes.

  Drew high stepped his way over the dismembered pieces and parts of the former crowd of killers. Lisa followed pointing her flashlight down to help him keep his footing. He didn’t bother looking down the hall towards the distant side where the crawlerz would be coming in through the window. He shifted Yue around on his shoulders and kept his eyes on the new prize. The prize in this case being the entrance to the hopefully deserted stairs about twenty feet away from them.

  While Drew played hopscotch through a hallway littered with body parts the others turned to face the mob of crawlerz racing towards them from the other end of the hallway. Their guns roared to life behind Drew as he reached out to grab the handle of the door labeled ‘stairs’. Yue was squirming around on his shoulders. Her movement reassured him since he’d been worried that she might have been knocked unconscious again. He shifted her around so he could open the door to the hopefully empty staircase. He was immediately attacked by an infected man who’d been a tax attorney before his mid-life crisis wound up getting him bitten by an infected Porsche salesman.

  Unceremoniously dumping Yue headfirst onto the concrete floor Drew sidestepped the hard charging auditor. The number crunching crawler slammed into the vending machines behind them. Drew was slinging lead into the crawler from his rifle almost before Yue hit the floor. The bullets ripped the flesh off the monster who’d bounced off the Coke machine and lunged for Drew again. Drew was knocked back against the wall with the bullet riddled carcass of his bloodied assailant crumpling to the floor beside him. The body settled right on top of Yue.

  LeBron and Lisa appeared with their flashlights arcing through the darkness. They saw a shocked Drew, an open staircase door and wondered fearfully where Yue was. When Drew bent down and pushed the bloody body off of his sister everyone let out a collective sigh of relief. There’d already been too much death for one day. It was too loud to talk since Harley was trying his best to use his entire ammunition supply in the hallway. Looking to make way for the big guy when he finished his murder spree they hustled into the stairwell. Having already been attacked once Drew was shining his light all over the place to see if he saw any more infected hanging out in the musty concrete passageway.

  “Shut the door!” Harley literally flew into the space from outside. He bowled over Lisa who’d been standing ready with LeBron to jump in and slam the door shut. The two of them rolled down almost an entire flight of stairs together.

  LeBron dodged the Harley juggernaut to pull as hard as he could on the handle of the door. It was setup so you couldn’t slam it. He‘d been standing there holding it wide open. A big boom sounded from down the hall. LeBron was tossed backwards as the door was rocked shut by the shockwave from the grenade going off. It would’ve slammed shut all the way, but a crawler managed to get its hand between the door frame and the door. The door pulverized the bones in the thing’s hand, but the door didn’t quite latch all the way shut.

  Drew quickly tossed Yue to the ground again. He was careful not to just drop her this time. He didn’t know how many more blows to the head she could take. If they made it out of there alive, he was going to make her start wearing a helmet. He bounded towards the door the second he’d shifted Yue to the cold concrete of the staircase landing.

  What do you do about a hand that’s been smashed into a door jam? Drew grabbed it. The nasty lump of fleshy goo felt like a warm Ziploc bag filled with tomato soup and crackers. The hand twitched around and started trying to open the door. Rather than fight it Drew went all Kung Fu and rammed his shoulder into the door. He was trying to leverage the momentum from the crawler outside to ram the door hard into its face. Already weakened by being pelted in the back by multiple frags from the grenade the crawler lost its grip. Drew tugged hard on the handle to the door. This time it made an extremely satisfying noise as it snapped shut.

  “As long as they can’t figure out the intricacies of pulling on a door instead of trying to beat it down, I think we’re good.” Drew announced to a stairwell filled with people who didn’t really care what he was thinking at the moment.

  “Wasn’t there one hiding out in here already when you opened the door the first time?” LeBron asked from the floor. He’d given up trying to see how bad he was hurt. Between the weapons strapped to him, his pack, his multiple shirts and jackets he wasn’t going to be able to peel down to his skin soon enough anyway. He’d just have to hope he didn’t bleed to death before they found a safe room.

  “Yep. One in ten thousand can figure out how to operate a door handle. I like those odds.” Drew joked. He was making light of the situation while being seriously concerned about everyone. Harley and Lisa were working to recover from their very abrupt trip down the stairs. Yue was twitching around and groaning a little bit on the floor. LeBron looked like a giant had grabbed him and used his body to clean up a spaghetti sauce spill. How was Drew supposed to get them up multiple flights of stairs to safety? He needed to get it done before that one in ten thousand genius level crawler happened along and popped open a door.

  “Time for some stair climbers.” Harley said leaning down to help LeBron to his feet. Lisa got on the other side of LeBron. Together her and a hurting Harley were able to keep LeBron moving along. Drew picked Yue back up and they trudged solemnly up the stairs.

  “Down a level.” Drew said staring at the padlock and chain wound tightly around the door marked ‘roof access’. The chain was most likely a leftover from hotel management trying to keep romance seekers from going up on the roof at night. It very effectively spelled the end to LeBron’s whole sleeping under the stars plan. Gus had been the one ca
rrying the lock loppers. They were somewhere far below them now wherever Gus had come to rest.

  They went down a level then carefully popped the door open. Leaving the others in the stairwell Drew and Lisa entered the floor and made sure the hallway looked clear. Shining their lights around they didn’t see anything but doors and the ever-present vending machines. They took a quick spin to the end of the hall and back. It looked like they’d reached a level where they might actually be safe.

  Once everyone had moved from the stairwell into the hallway Drew recruited Lisa and Harley to help him shove the vending machines in front of the door to the stairs. It took some time and serious cussing, but they were eventually able to wedge the machines where they wanted them. That should keep even the most dedicated crawler from getting the door to open wide enough for them to slink through.

  Gus had been the expert at getting into rooms that were locked. It took them a few minutes and more than a few rounds, but they were standing inside a nice sized suite soon enough. Drew asked Lisa to tend to LeBron and Yue in the king-sized bed in the bedroom section of the suite. He realized how exhausted he was when Lisa handed him a bucket and asked him to go get some ice. He was halfway to the door before sensing her giant smirk behind him. Rolling his eyes, he turned around and went with her to help get LeBron’s shirt off so they could patch him up.