Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series

by Bryan Cassiday

  Mannering backtracked, wielding his cleaver in one hand and firing his pistol in the other as the creatures kept coming relentlessly after him. He could see no end to the swarm of creatures that pursued him.

  “These things are crawling out of the woodwork,” he said.

  “Let’s run for it,” said Halverson.

  Mannering squeezed his Glock’s trigger one more time. The gun clicked empty. Mannering pulled the trigger again. The hammer snicked. Nothing doing.

  He and Halverson spun around and made a beeline for the motor carts at speed.

  “This is suck city,” said Mannering, breathing hard as he sprinted.

  “Look at it this way. Can things get any worse than they are now?”

  Mannering shrugged. “I guess not.”

  But they were both wrong.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Huffing and puffing, Mannering held up the Glock in his hand. “I hope you’ve got ammo for this thing,” he told Halverson as they reached the carts.

  “Some,” said Halverson, gulping for air.

  He fished out a spare magazine from his trouser pocket. He displayed the magazine.

  Mannering snatched the magazine from Halverson’s hand. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  They jumped into their motor carts.

  “Let’s beat it,” Halverson told Victoria, who was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “Where’s Felix?” demanded Reba from the other cart, her voice strident.

  “He’s dead,” said Halverson.

  “He wasn’t dead until you killed him.”

  “He was one of them,” said Mannering beside Reba. “I saw his face. It was all messed up.”

  “And you killed him?”

  “Chad did.”

  Reba glared at Halverson.

  “Everybody could see that coming,” said Becker, trying to stoke Reba’s animus toward Halverson.

  Victoria drove into the cluttered intersection. She was able to negotiate a passage through the parked cars onto the sidewalk on Butler Avenue. Reba followed her. Becker brought up the rear. The carts headed down the avenue’s sidewalk.

  “Where’s the police department?” asked Victoria, loud enough for Mannering to hear.

  “About a mile from here,” answered Mannering. “Not even that.”

  “As soon as we’re done there, we go to 26th Street so I can find Shawna.”

  “Put some distance between us and those things,” said Halverson.

  He could hear his heart still pounding fast and hard from his recent donnybrook with the ghouls. He gasped for breath.

  “Is this nightmare ever going to end?” said Victoria.

  Halverson donned the night-vision goggles. They wouldn’t stay on his head on account of the goggles’ broken straps. He held the NVGs in place and peered through them at the eerie green-tinted landscape.

  As the police department came into sight, Halverson let out a sigh.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Victoria.

  “I think I can see the police department.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s surrounded by creatures. They’re swarming all over it.”

  “Maybe it’s not the police department. How can you tell?”

  “There’s a parking lot across from it full of black-and-whites.”

  “Wonderful.”

  She pulled to a halt. Reba parked behind them.

  “What’s up?” asked Reba.

  Victoria told her.

  “Damn,” growled Mannering. “Those things got my buddies there. I hate those things! Let me see.”

  Halverson handed the goggles to Mannering.

  Mannering placed them on his head. He shook his head disconsolately at the sight of the rampaging ghouls. He could see three ghouls tearing the throat out of a police officer, who was blasting them in their hearts with his pistol to no avail.

  Other than that, Mannering saw no signs of life. Scores of ghouls were staggering in and out of the police department at will.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone in there beside those things,” he said.

  Mannering handed the goggles back to Halverson.

  “What should we do?” asked Reba.

  “We should check out the department just to make sure,” answered Mannering.

  “There are too many of those things over there,” said Halverson.

  “I hate leaving my buddies in there to get torn apart.” Mannering’s voice cracked.

  A straggling female creature in its thirties lurched down the sidewalk toward them. When Mannering clapped eyes on it, he lost it.

  In an access of rage, he leapt out of his seat, charged the thing, and lopped its rotting head off with one powerful stroke of the cleaver. The head dribbled down the sidewalk. Mannering ran after the bobbing skull.

  The head was still alive. It grimaced at him with its foul, decaying mouth. Mannering snatched one of his Glocks out of his waistband and blew a hole in the middle of the skull’s forehead. The head stopped grimacing.

  Mannering grabbed the head by its black hair and hauled it back to the carts.

  Halverson watched Mannering carrying the head toward him. With its thick black hair and broad features, it had the face of a female Eskimo, it looked like to Halverson. The face’s cheekbones were exposed due to the disintegration and putrefaction of the flesh that had once enveloped them. As well, half of its thick grey lips had been eaten away by the ravaging effects of the plague.

  “Don’t bring that thing back here,” said Reba in disgust. “Get rid of it.”

  Mannering kept his own counsel.

  He put the head in the footwell. In silence, he retrieved a shovel, sat down, and started sharpening the end of its wooden handle with his cleaver. He whittled the handle to a point. He laid his cleaver down.

  Steadying the upside-down head in the footwell with his feet squeezing the skull in place, he plunged the sharpened end of the handle into the bottom of the severed head, through the throat, and into the brain.

  He lifted the impaled head above the cart. He flourished the head, waving it at the creatures, trying to inflame them.

  “You think you’re bad!” he snarled. “We’re ten times worse!”

  “Just get rid of that thing,” said Reba.

  Mannering ignored her.

  He twisted around in his seat and manhandled the moneybags forward. “What’s in these bags, anyway?” he said, straining to shift them.

  Reba said nothing.

  Mannering took the blade of the shovel and inserted it behind one of the moneybags. He shoved the moneybag against the blade to hold the shovel in place with the ghastly head looming over the motor cart.

  Reba climbed out of the driver’s seat. “I’m not driving with that thing leering over me.”

  Mannering exchanged seats with her, nothing loath. “Fine with me.”

  He raised a war whoop and drove toward the creature-infested one-story brick police department.

  “What are you doing?” cried Reba in terror.

  “There’s only one thing these ghouls understand. Attack!”

  Mannering flicked on his headlights.

  “The lights will attract the things,” said Reba.

  “Good.” He turned on the high beams.

  When the streeling ghouls saw the beams thrown by the headlights, they faced the lights and shambled toward the onrushing motor cart.

  Mannering leaned on his horn.

  “Take a look at your friend’s head on the end of a stake!” Mannering hollered at the creatures.

  One hand on the steering wheel, Mannering opened fire with the Glock in his other, cutting down the two nearest ghouls on a dime. These two especially scraggy creatures fell in heaps of bones and rags on the sidewalk.

  “If you want to commit suicide, don’t do it with me around,” Reba told Mannering.

  A clutch of creatures stumbled out of the police station’s front door to investigate the gun reports. Two of th
e creatures wore black police uniforms.

  When Mannering set eyes on the duo he could not pull the trigger. It was hard to shoot fellow officers, even if they were ghouls. He recognized one of the things and that made it harder. The figure’s face was shot all to hell, looking like it had been mauled by a pit bull. Still, Mannering recognized it.

  It was Rodriguez.

  Strips of moldering flesh dangled in tatters from Rodriguez’s cheekbones, but it was Rodriguez. Mannering was sure of it.

  Overwhelmed, Mannering just sat and stared at him, unable to move.

  Rodriguez had close-cropped black hair and was in his late twenties. He had a wife and two kids, Mannering knew. Mannering had met Rodriguez’s entire family.

  Mannering could not bring himself to pull the trigger on Rodriguez. This was a guy who Mannering had gone on patrol with. They had ridden in the same black-and-white together on numerous occasions.

  Bathed in the beams of the cart’s headlights, Rodriguez and three other creatures scrabbled toward Mannering’s cart.

  Mannering had entertained vague ideas of dashing into the building and grabbing guns and ammo when he had first stormed the station, but now he knew he had a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling it off. The station was riddled with creatures, he could see from here.

  And just like that, out of nowhere, Rodriguez had entered the picture.

  It was too much for Mannering to come to grips with. He sat motionless in a state of emotional paralysis.

  “Do something!” Reba cried into Mannering’s face, as the creatures closed in on the motor cart.

  Rodriguez and a middle-aged creature had already reached the cart’s front fender. Their hands curled like claws, the two creatures groped toward Mannering and Reba.

  Mannering shook himself out of his funk.

  He threw the motor cart into reverse.

  Twenty feet later he managed to turn the cart around on the sidewalk and headed back toward Halverson, Victoria, and Becker.

  Agitated by Mannering’s earlier gunshots, a couple dozen creatures had congregated around the police station’s entrance and were now plodding after Mannering’s vehicle.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “What was that all about?” said Halverson, as he watched Mannering return.

  “I thought I could duck in there, get my hands on some guns and ammo, and duck out,” said Mannering. He shook his head. “There are just too many of them.”

  “It looked like you froze out there.”

  “I saw a partner of mine. It’s hard to pull the trigger on a buddy.”

  “It’s not your buddy anymore. It’s a creature.”

  “I kept telling myself that when I saw him, but the words didn’t sink in.”

  “Kill your lights.”

  Mannering doused the headlights.

  “Why did you turn them on in the first place?” asked Halverson. “The ghouls are attracted to light and sound.”

  “I know. It was shock and awe. I wanted to hit them with everything I had—bright lights, blaring noises, and guns blazing—to disorient them.”

  “It got ’em all worked up,” said Reba. “That’s all.”

  Mannering shook his head. “Those things are too stupid to feel fear. It’s impossible to shock and awe them.”

  “Life is meaningless to them.”

  “Only creatures that want to go on living can feel fear,” said Halverson. “Those things are already dead. They can’t feel any emotions. The only thing they want to do is eat living flesh.”

  “How do you deal with things like that?”

  “You kill them. There’s no other way to deal with them.”

  “It’s them or us, huh?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Now what do we do?”

  “Good question.”

  “It looks like we’re not gonna be able to get any guns here,” said Mannering, “so there’s no point in staying here.”

  “Let’s go back to Wilshire,” said Victoria. “Then we can head west to my house on 26th Street.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we go to the ocean,” put in Halverson.

  “What’s there?”

  “Maybe we can find a boat. Maybe there are more survivors there. I don’t know. Does anybody else have a better idea?”

  “We need to get out of here,” said Becker, who had up to this point remained silent.

  “It ain’t safe here with all those things milling around,” said Mannering. “That’s for sure.”

  Halverson and the others drove back to Wilshire.

  Halverson figured this was as good a time as any to put his call through to the Agency.

  He pulled his satphone out of his trouser pocket. He switched the phone on, punched in the access code, and put in a call to the Agency. He listened intently to the phone ring four times, hoping beyond hope that somebody would answer.

  Somebody picked up. “Hello.”

  Halverson clenched the phone in eagerness at the sound of another voice, his knuckles turning white.

  “Hello,” said Halverson. “Could I speak to Scot Mellors, the deputy director of the NCS?”

  He kept his voice low so Victoria wouldn’t be tempted to eavesdrop.

  “Who is this?” said the man at the other end of the line.

  “Halverson.”

  “Halverson? We’ve been trying to contact you for days. Where have you been?”

  “I’m in LA. Who is this?”

  Halverson thought he recognized the man’s voice, but he couldn’t place it.

  “This is Greg Coogan.”

  “Coogan?”

  Halverson knew Coogan. They were both about the same age and were in the black ops division of the National Clandestine Service.

  “We’ve been trying to contact all our agents to get a sitrep from wherever they are,” said Coogan.

  “I tried to phone in earlier, but my phone wasn’t working.”

  “What’s it like in Los Angeles?”

  “It’s a disaster. The whole city’s either burning or already burned. The plague hit here. Infected people are attacking and eating whoever’s left alive.”

  “Yeah. Those are the kinds of reports we’re getting from everywhere.”

  “Is the whole country infected?”

  “As far as we know, this plague is worldwide.”

  “Where’s the president?”

  “What’s left of the government is holed up in the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center just outside Bluemont, Virginia. It’s bombproof and we’ve got our own air supply to protect us from breathing in pathogens. The Pentagon command center is at Site R near Waynesboro, Pennsylvania.”

  Halverson listened in awe. “Site R. That’s Raven Rock, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have they found out what caused this plague in China?”

  “Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” said Coogan, lowering his voice.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Listen to me.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The plague didn’t start in China,” said Coogan in earnest.

  “The first outbreak was reported in China.” Halverson knew because he was working on the Agency investigation of the disease before he flew to LA.

  “That was disinformation spread by the Agency.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is what really happened, and nobody outside of the Agency is supposed to know this.”

  “There’s nobody left living to tell it to anyway.”

  “Did you ever hear of the Erasmus medical center in Rotterdam?”

  “Holland?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never heard of this Erasmus place.”

  “They have special labs there for studying the H5N1 bird flu virus. They have a BSL3-plus lab there.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “A Biosafety Level 3 Enhanced lab. The air pressure in the lab is lower than in t
he surrounding area so the air will always be sucked into the lab and never escape it. There is no chance for the virus to escape. Virus filters purify the air. The lab can be entered only through a locked chamber by vaccinated researchers in special full-body hazmat uniforms, basically spacesuits. These researchers breathe their own purified air through powered respirators.”

  “I get the idea.”

  “These researchers work in hermetically sealed ‘biological safety work bench isolators.’”

  “Say again.”

  “These isolators prevent contaminated air from escaping into the atmosphere. Even waste is sterilized before being thrown out.”

  “So what happened?” asked Halverson on tenterhooks, trying to get Coogan to cut to the chase.

  “This research group has an environmental permit from the Ministry for Infrastructure and the Environment. The Erasmus facilities have the highest level of security to prevent anyone from stealing the virus. Also, there’s an isolation room if somebody by some remote chance does get infected.”

  “Somebody stole this bird flu virus from Erasmus? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Worse than that.”

  Halverson shook his head in confusion, trying to digest Coogan’s news. “Bird flu doesn’t cause zombies. Not that I ever heard of.”

  “This isn’t H5N1, or bird flu as it’s popularly called. H5N1 spreads between people only in very rare cases. When it does spread, it’s 60 percent fatal. It’s one of the deadliest microbes known to man. The Spanish flu back in 1918 killed 50 million people, but it had a kill ratio of only 3 percent. Can you imagine what would happen if H5N1 could spread as easily as the Spanish flu did between people?”

  “I don’t see how this ties in with these flesh-eating creatures that are rising from the dead.”

  “The researchers were working on a man-made version of H5N1, one that is highly infectious and spreads rapidly between people.”

  “Why? Were they making it for germ warfare?”

  “They were making it to help invent a vaccination for H5N1. To make a long story short, they were able to mutate the H5N1 in their Erasmus labs into a highly infectious disease that has no known cure, is a hundred percent fatal, and causes reanimation in the infected victims.”