“Head to the truck!” he shouted. He stood his ground. He didn’t want to waste bullets; he would have to wait until they got closer. If he hit an arm, they would keep charging. He planted his feet apart, just as he had seen at the movies, and lined a body up down the barrel. His hand shook as the creatures rushed straight at him, with their wide mouths gaping open, and red eyes staring, anticipating the kill.
The others started running toward the truck. All except Juan. He didn’t stand next to Alex waiting for the creatures to reach him; he started striding towards them.
“For god’s sake Juan, what’re you doing?” Alex shouted as he noticed Juan out the corner of his eye.
Juan had the gun held straight out, taking aim as he walked. His first shot took down a teenage female who already had half her face missing. The second bullet spun a man around, and he tumbled down hard. The third bullet hit a woman straight between the eyes, and she skidded along the ground and rolled over, stopping a mere meter away from Juan’s trainers, as she gave out a gurgle as her eyes dulled. Just as the man was climbing to his feet, Juan strode up to him, kicked him in the back to spin him over, and as the man’s deformed mouth opened wide to scream at him, Juan put a bullet through his right eye.
Jesus, he enjoyed that, Alex thought.
“We gotta go,” he shouted at Juan’s back.
Juan sniffed, wiped a hand across his forehead and turned around.
“Sure,” he muttered as if having done nothing unusual.
With one more glance, to check Juan was behind him; Alex ran toward the truck.
The others were climbing into the back container, which was empty of all their belongings. Alex pushed the back door closed. He could hear the chain rattle.
Alex and Juan then jumped in the passenger side of the cab, just as Troy forced the truck in gear and hit the gas, spinning the large wheels as it screeched into reverse.
66
The underground bunker ‘Wonderland’
Quirauk Mountain, Pennsylvania
Alarm bells pierced the air. Red lights flashed on the walls and ceilings. The whole underground bunker was on high alert. A loud female voice clearly announced, “Evacuate the bunker...” repeatedly in a calm modulated, mechanical voice.
It was complete chaos. No one knew what was happening. Was it an exercise, or was it a real emergency?
At first, scientist and soldiers calmly headed for the elevators. Lines started to grow, as people waited their turn. No report were announced to state what the emergency was. The alarms were too loud to talk over, so people simply waited their turn to step into an elevator to take them to the surface, just like countless other test runs. Most were bored, and the alarm was annoying.
A few casually headed towards the long flight of concrete steps, but climbing half a mile of steps was most people’s idea of a nightmare.
Then the black spore started to seep through the vents and swirl around the stationary people.
Panic rained down. The calm lines fragmented as people fought to get a space. The door to the stairs was blocked by people elbowing and punching their way through, the prospect of a long climb no longer an issue.
Gunfire rang out as soldiers used their weapons to clear space for themselves. They were soon swamped by people charging them, trying to get their weapons. Blood started to drench the carpets and tiles and splatter up the white, immaculate walls.
The black spores filled the laboratories, offices, corridors, mess halls, sleeping quarters, and eventually the elevator shafts and stairwells. No one was impervious to the swirling black clouds that churned down their throats and up their nostrils, clogging their lungs.
Choking people started dropping like flies. They hit desks and the carpet, twitching and jerking.
Within five minutes of the spores escaping the pod chamber, the bunker was eerily silent of all human activity. All that could be heard was labored breathing.
67
Alex, Troy, Juan, Bonnie, Tierra, Dante, Cody, Jessica, and Frank
Mole Town street
A military installation outside New York City
The truck rammed the parked cars. Metal screeched as the strong engine shunted the smaller vehicle’s aside.
Alex kept an eye out for soldiers or infected.
Juan had ejected his magazine and was counting the bullets he had left.
Troy was sweating as he concentrated on pushing the cars back to make a clear passage.
Inside the container, the others were sat down, trying to keep their balance. There was more room now the army had stolen their food, water, and blankets.
Jessica held onto the back doors. The latch was down, but the chain wasn’t across. She was ready to release the latch if someone banged. She was aware the others were still out there.
Naomi was by her side, with the bar still gripped in her hand. One eye was completely closed over. She didn’t seem to notice the pain. In fact, she had just thrust her hand into her pocket and removed a finger covered in a white powder, and proceeded to rub it into her gums.
“Want some,” she asked. “For courage?”
Jessica ignored her and kept hold of the metal door lock.
Cody was leaning against the wall. He was a little groggy, but he was coming around slowly. He was asking where Abigail was.
No one was answering him. They all pretended they didn’t hear his repeated question.
“Incoming,” Alex said, as a group of infected ran from a broken shop window, which they had obviously come through the back door of, heading towards the sound of gunfire and screeching metal.
The truck would protect them. Those in the container were safer. The cab was surrounded by glass. Thick glass, but glass all the same.
The last car was shunted out of the way. The truck reversed while turning around, making an annoying and loud alarm. Troy ground the gears as he shoved it into first and jolted forward.
Five creatures charged directly at the truck, hitting the large radiator. Three disappeared out of sight. The truck hardly bounced as it ran over them. One hung on for a few seconds longer, before vanishing from view, leaving behind a few nails in the bonnet crease. The fifth managed to pull himself up, and like a large pink, skinny insect, he scuttled along the bonnet towards the windshield, smearing blood as he moved – he had a long cut across his chest. It then head butted the glass, face-first with bone-crushing force, leaving behind a handful of teeth in a bloody smear.
Troy turned the wheel to miss the other group of naked people. A few managed to grab the truck as it sped past. One red headed female with very pale, shit-splattered skin, managed to grab the side mirror. The momentum made her slam into the passenger-side door. Her face hit the window hard, leaving hair stuck to the blood and saliva smear.
The man on the bonnet was bashing his face with ferocious speed into the glass. Small cracks started to appear.
“Fuck this,” Juan stated as the cracks became wider, spreading out like a spider’s web.
He wound the window down a fraction and put the barrel through. With one bullet through the face, the female let go and tumbled away. Juan lowered the window more and knelt on the leather seat. He put his arm out, and bent it around the side. It took three shots to kill the frantic creature hell-bent on putting his face through the glass. It went limp and slowly slid over the side, leaving a long dirty, bloody smear and chunks of pulpy brain matter.
Juan quickly rolled the window up.
As the truck skidded around the corner, they were confronted by a raging fire on one side that had jumped to connecting buildings, with the firetruck in the middle of the road. Around it, the soldiers were fighting for their lives as the infected filled the street like a naked Mardi Gras festival.
Alex was amazed at their numbers. There were hundreds of them churning around like a biomass wave, preceded by a low-level groaning, and howling sound that made the hair on the nape of his neck stand on end.
68
Doctor Bachman
<
br /> The pod chamber
Quirauk Mountain, Pennsylvania
Bachman’s head ached. It took a few seconds for his brain to catch up. He then realized it wasn’t just his head; it was his whole body, as if he had been hit by a bus.
Then his memory rushed back.
He sat up as quickly as he could.
The view port of the suit looked unaffected by the fall, or the smack from the root. He scanned the bits of the suit he could see. No rips.
Bachman’s ears were ringing from the hit, but as they subsided, another ringing could be heard – alarm bells.
He then scanned the room. Everything was still. The roots were no longer worming around the floor, or jiggling on the walls or ceiling.
The pods were gone. He saw them sprout legs and scurry off. Even the large eight-foot pod was gone, just a depression in the root structure to show something heavy once rested there. The ends of the roots looked as if they had been ripped free from something. A black oily substance dribbled from the separated ends.
Legs!
They looked like alien spiders crawling around. That explained how, if they grew together, some ended up in different locations. He imagined those things creeping over the landscape. He shuddered.
How long it must of took, if they grew together, for them to reach different locations on the planet! Decades, centuries?
He slowly made his way to the smashed fumigable transfer hatch. The white misty substance was running down the cracked walls, and rolling across the floor, like a heavy morning mist.
The roots felt different under his boots. They no longer felt alive they now felt inanimate. A presence has also gone. Before you could feel something in the room. Now there was nothing except dead... dead what? Dead plant? Dead animal? A mixture of both?
During his research into other species that resembled the pods, and having new data come in all the time, Bachman remembers a recent discovery of a sea slug called an Elysia Chlorotica. The creature feeds by sucking the insides out of strands of algae. The creature then used the algae’s properties to produce food via sunlight. It looks like a mixture of a slug and a leaf – a leaf, with veins, and a creatures head. The first known living thing that is a fusion of plant and animal of its kind – a new photoautotroph.
Or is it the first? Bachman wondered. Then again, the pods have been buried for thousands of years. They’ve had no access to sunlight. Besides, the pods are black; they would have to be green to absorb what they need.
As a scientist, he knew the process of photosynthesis always begins when energy from light is absorbed by proteins called reaction centers that contain chlorophyll pigments – these pigments are always green.
Also, if they could move, why hadn’t they? So in fact, they have never been trapped so to speak, they could have moved at any time. So we thought we had the upper hand, when, in fact, they did.
It was interesting food for thought, and his scientific brain was churning the information around, but he knew now wasn’t the time to ponder the new information.
Carefully he picked his way through the Clean Room. It wasn’t clean anymore.
Blood covered the walls and floor and ceiling. There were the remains of two corpses, half-submerged in the white misty vapor that swirled around them. He found it hard to imagine that only two carcasses had that much blood inside them. One was mangled in the corner, with the remains of the Hazmat suit on. The other was headless in the middle of the room. As the mist rolled, he could see chunks gouged out of the floor.
It must be where the large pod stomped through.
The door was ripped off the hinges, and chunks were missing either side of the double door and above.
Surely the large pod is too big to make it to the surface? The small ones will have no trouble. Then once they are free, we will have difficulty finding them. Potentially there will be six new strains literally running around. Then he realized. No seven! All the pods are different from the strain now effecting humanity.
He realized the black spores swirling around the ceiling were completely different from what was mutating his species.
The pods, and spores, had to be stopped from reaching the surface, at any costs.
69
Alex, Troy, Juan, Bonnie, Tierra, Dante, Cody, Jessica, and Frank
In the truck on Main Street, Mole Town
A military installation outside New York City
Troy spun the wheel from side to side, trying to avoid the worst of the infected, and some of the soldiers who were still alive.
“Don’t worry about them fuckers, mow them down as well,” Juan spat.
Troy ignored him as he swerved to miss a soldier on the ground that was covered with five naked people. It probably would have been more humane to run him over than to leave him to be ripped apart, but it was a natural instinct of decades of driving; he automatically tried to miss as many as possible.
However, that wasn’t always the case, there were just too many of them in the street. The windshield wipers were on full. Troy even sprayed the windshield to clean it off a bit, leaving two large arches of smears surrounded by blood and chunks of gore. It was difficult to see where they were going.
As the loud truck revved and charged down the street, it drew a lot of attention. The infected veered towards the noise. Soft thuds could be heard as they slammed into the sides of the container.
There was a group of about eight or nine soldiers still left standing, protected by one side of the firetruck. Machine-gun fire burped in short bursts, while they tried to save ammo. However, they were fighting a hopeless battle.
Troy had to slow the truck due to the amount of bodies piled in the street. The large truck jolted from side to side as it drove over them.
At that point, the heavens decided to open and a torrent poured from the dark churning clouds. Thunder boomed and lightning paused the scene outside the windshield for a fraction of a second. The rushing water streaked down the windshield, leaving lines in the blood and dirt.
It ran over the face of another creature that made it up onto the bonnet and was slamming into the glass, saturating its naked body, making it look like it had just crawled from the ocean.
More creatures poured from side streets, and through broken shop windows. There were just too many of them. They were creating an almost impenetrable wall of flesh and bone, now blurred by the downpour.
The large trucks wheels squelched over the bodies. The creatures climbed over the slippery bonnet and covered the windshield, as more started slamming fists and heads against the side windows. They scurried over the roof and slammed into the sides.
The soldiers vanished behind a mass of blood-covered flesh.
The truck was pinned down by the infected.
70
Doctor Bachman
The underground bunker
Quirauk Mountain, Pennsylvania
Bachman was amazed at the amount of bodies that littered the corridors. He had yet to meet another living person. They seemed to have been crushed by a heavy object, smearing the burst bodies along the corridors. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were male or female. He had to be careful he didn’t slip on blood or a pulped organ.
When he reached the elevator, he found it destroyed. The thick doors were buckled, and the cables snapped. He could see the elevator car smashed one level down. Running up the concrete walls was indentations; holes where the large pod had scaled the inside of the shaft.
Does it know where it is, or how far it is to the surface?
He had to take the stairs. He had no idea how many levels down he was, or how long it would take to climb them in the cumbersome suit. But he had no choice; the air was thick with black spores that danced across the ceiling; he had to keep it on. He checked the tank. There was thirty-one minutes of air left. He was already hot and exhausted. He needed water. Luckily, the suit had an optional air scrubber, for emergencies, but he didn’t know if it filtered out the spores?
If it wo
rked on the spores, why would they have given me an oxygen tank? he reasoned. If it came to the crunch, he decided he would have to chance it. It was that or suffocate. He had no idea how long it would take to get to the surface. That’s if he could get past the pods and whatever else was waiting for him on the levels above.
There had to be some people alive. There were thousands in the bunker. Scientists and soldiers, along with assistants, cooks, engineers, and others. The pods couldn’t have killed them all, only those in their way. The others would have to breathe in the spores though. That’s unless some managed to make it to some breathing gear in time.
He had plenty of time to think as he slowly climbed the stairs in the heavy suit.
About five levels up he came across a female in army uniform that was choking. She obviously digested a large amount of the spores. She was leaning her back against the wall, struggling for breath. She pulled at her clothing, popping off the buttons on her top. She panted quickly, like a rabid dog with rabies. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, and the whites were clouded red. Her hands were by her sides, with her fingers stretched so they were almost bent backwards. Her back was arched so far it looked like she might have snapped some vertebra.
Bachman stood on the last step looking at her. She must have heard his approach, but she didn’t react.
Before she was infected, she was tall and pretty. Her long red hair was tied in a bob. Freckles covered her pale cheeks. She couldn’t have been older than twenty at most.
The spores were acting very fast. Technically, this was a different strain than he was used to. The Madagascan pod was slow acting, taking days to get to this stage, but this woman was already unresponsive, and there wasn’t any rapid eye blinking, rather she was panting very fast – it had only been twenty or so minutes since the spores escaped. He hadn’t seen this reaction before.
The Sixth Extinction America Omnibus [Books 1-12] Page 19