Run (Book 2): The Crossing

by Rich Restucci

  “But I don’t like climbin’. There ain’t no other way? None?”

  “No. There ain’t,” Seyfert said the word in a southern drawl. “Yeah, it sucks, but what else can we do? It will bring us right into the loading dock, which is the only part of the facility that isn’t as secure as the rest.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not,” Bourne added, “but I don’t see any other options.”

  Rick let out a deep breath. “C’mon, hillbilly, the colonel had a bullet in his shoulder a week and a half ago, and he’s gonna climb down.”

  Bourne rubbed his shoulder again, and Dallas scratched his head. “I’m a mite prickly with heights is all.”

  “Don’t look down then,” Phil chimed. “If you don’t look down, it will feel like you’re on a step ladder three feet in the air. Just look right in front of you.”

  “Yeah, I heard that b’fore.”

  Seyfert spread his hands wide on a table, flattening out a rolled up blue-print he had gotten from a hanging print closet. MIT was constantly upgrading or altering wiring, so blue-prints of the facility were a must to the scientists who worked there. “We’re here.” The SEAL pointed, tracing his finger across a hallway and down an elevator shaft. “It’s about sixty six feet from the entrance of this shaft on the fifth floor to the base of the shaft at the loading dock. It will be a long climb on the service ladder, but we can do it. We’ll lower the data and gear down first and follow. Ravi says that the loading dock is relatively small, so the amount of Limas down there should be negligible.”

  “It’s true, the area is small, but there’s still an issue,” Ravi pointed out.

  Seyfert looked up, “What issue?”

  “What if the loading dock door isn’t closed?”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit? Izzat the best ya got? Shit?”

  “Okay, so we tie the bags off just below the second floor, and everybody waits on the ladder while Dallas, Rick, and I clear the dock area. If we can’t clear the area, we climb back up and figure something else out.”

  “That’s a lotta climbin’ boy.”

  “Shoulda laid off the pasta and cheeseburgers, hillbilly.”

  “Damn, Rick. Don’t be sayin’ cheeseburgers in front o’ me no more. Might be ya get bit by a live person instead of a dead-un.”

  “Enough. Seyfert’s plan is good. Well done. Are there any questions before we begin?”

  Ravi looked at Brenda, and they both looked at Henry, who raised his hand.

  “Yes, Henry?”

  “We, uh, we need the RAID on seven?”

  “What is radon seven?” Bourne demanded. “Some type of chemical agent?”

  “What? No. No it’s a system of computer hard drives. Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID. It’s on the seventh floor. In the magno lab.”

  Dallas looked at Henry. “But you said the seventh was fulla dead people?”

  Ravi let out a breath. “It is. There are eleven of our friends, plus…plus five test subjects,” he said sheepishly.

  Brenda immediately started on the defensive. “The test subjects were necessary to—”

  Bourne cut in. “Forget the subjects. Where are these discs and how do we get to them?”

  “The array is on a lab bench in the magno lab,” Henry explained. “It’s a black box about this tall,” he put his palm about two feet from the floor, “but it’s heavy. Forty pounds anyway.”

  Bourne let out a sigh as he rubbed his eyes with his palms. He folded his hands then steepled them with his thumbs under his chin and looked at Henry. “And of course all of your data is on those hard drives correct?”

  “Not all of it.”

  Seyfert threw himself into a chair. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  “Secure that tone, seaman, this was the mission from the get-go.”

  “Roger that, sir. Sorry.”

  The colonel looked at Brenda. “So there are sixteen undead upstairs, and you need a black box that’s in the middle of them?”

  “Actually the magno lab is at the back of the building,” Henry said.

  “Oh, I’m startin’ ta dislike where this is goin’.”

  A half hour later, Seyfert, Rick, and Dallas were looking up and down a stairwell. Henry Cho was with them, looking nervous. “Seventh is only one floor up, but the whole stairwell is clear from the basement to the eighth.”

  “That’s good news at least.” Seyfert pulled his black tactical facemask up. “Henry, we move together, use the hand signals we taught you to communicate, and for Christ’s sake stay with us.”

  The scientist looked around anxiously. “Why don’t I get a gun?”

  “Because I don’t want to worry about Limas and getting shot in the back.”

  Dallas pulled his rebar from his belt. “Here ya go, kid.” Henry grabbed it, but Dallas didn’t let go and the big man looked him in the eye. “Do not lose this.” Henry nodded and they began climbing the stairs.

  A gray steel fire door with a yellow 7 on it greeted them when they reached the landing after two short flights. Light poured from a small window at face height into the dimly lit stairway. Seyfert held up a fist and pulled out an inspection mirror, which he put in front of the window so he could see into the room. “Looks like a glass cube,” he whispered.

  Henry whispered back, “It’s an airlock. The whole floor is hermetic. My keycard will get us in this door and the next, but it beeps when I use it.”

  Seyfert took another look in the mirror. The immediate area was clear, but there were shadowy forms moving down the hall. “Dallas left, Rick right, I’m center. Henry, you stay inside us, bottom of the pyramid. Open it.”

  Henry moved forward, pulling a card on a lanyard from around his neck. He put the card in front of a reader, which emitted a quick beeping sound, and the red light on the reader turned green. There was an audible click, and Seyfert pulled the door open wide. The heavy door made the loudest sound of all as it opened, but no one came to greet them. Viscous fluids of many colors coated the airlock pane on the other side of them, with hand and fist prints covering the upper part of the glass as well.

  Seyfert glanced in all directions through the airlock glass. He looked apprehensive. “I don’t like this. Okay, I’m going to smack the glass with my rifle until we get company, then we fall back and smoke them as they fill the stairway. Henry, give me your key card, and get back and hold the sixth floor door.” Seyfert turned and spoke into his shoulder mic, “Actual, do you copy?”

  “Loud and clear. SITREP?”

  “We are about to breach, but no hostiles in sight. Blood on the airlock door indicates unfriendlies inside as we were told. Objective is to draw them out a few at a time and take them in the stairway. We need someone down there to open the door for Henry and keep a lookout. Stair team will fall back to six if necessary.”

  “Copy that. Door is open. Good luck.”

  Henry passed the card to Seyfert and wasted no time in beating a hasty retreat back the way they had come. Seyfert rapped the butt of his weapon on the door several times. Someone stuck their head out of a room a few meters up the hall, and looked in the other direction. The SEAL gave another light whack to the glass, and the thing turned and looked its red eyes at the stairway team. Its eyes widened and its mouth opened as it came at them in a slow plod. “Back up to the door behind us, Rick hold it open, Dallas back me up with the shotgun, but don’t shoot me.” He went over the load of his weapon in his mind and mentally ensured see he was fully loaded. As the creature got closer to the airlock, the team could hear it moaning. Seyfert looked back and nodded to his friends. “Here goes.”

  He put the card in front of the reader just as the thing started scratching at the glass. The reader beeped, the light turned green, the door whooshed left, and the dead woman fell forward on her hands and knees, as she was leaning forward for a particularly hard pound on the glass. The smell that wafted out of the lab was almost unbearable. Seyfert shot the thing in the back of the
head with a cold-loaded round before it could stand, and put his foot in the door to stop it from closing. The woman had a huge chunk of her neck missing, and a semicircle bite on her forearm. She looked freshly killed, a few days at most. “Come on out, pus bags,” yelled the SEAL, “I got something for you!”

  Three more undead came from forward of the team. One was walking oddly as it had no right foot. Seyfert, his foot in the door, sighted and took them out one by one. “Is that it?” called Seyfert. “Where are the rest of you dead fucks!” Dull thuds could be heard in the lab area down the corridor, but nothing else came out to play. “Shit. Okay, we go in. I’m on point. Watch your corners and check our six.”

  The three men moved forward slowly, stepping over the three corpses along the way. There were several doors off of a long corridor, then the corridor opened up into a large research area with lab benches and equipment. A glass wall, covered in gore, waited for them fifteen meters past that. Blood and gore spatter coated the walls and floor of the laboratory they were in, evidence of attacks as well. Overturned chairs and a parts bench, a computer monitor on the floor with a cracked photo of a long white beach flickering. Dallas shone his tac-light into the first door on the left, an empty office. He closed the door. Rick did exactly the same for the first office on the right. The next door on the left was smashed in and held the barely moving corpse of someone in a red cape. There was nothing left of the front of this thing. All of its muscle tissue had been eaten away, and the chest and abdominal cavity were empty. Eyes, face, both arms and one leg were totally gone, bones and all. The other leg ended at a gnawed stump at the knee. The door was destroyed and could not be closed, but the thing in the room would never move of its own volition again.

  The thudding continued.

  Two more offices held nothing, but the last one on the right contained a lone zombie, back to the door staring at posters on a wall. This one too had a mostly red cape, which the team silently acknowledged as a gore covered lab coat. Seyfert made to shoot it, but Dallas stopped him with a hand on his weapon. The big man stepped into the room and went for his rebar…only to realize he had given it to Henry. He gave a sharp intake of breath upon realizing his mistake, and the zombie whipped its head around and screamed, its hands clawing for the Texan. Seyfert shot it twice in the chest as Dallas backpedaled quickly. The thing fell on its back, and Seyfert put one through its forehead. Dallas swallowed hard, nodding his thanks to his friend. He closed the door and moved on.

  They reached the end of the corridor and came upon the glass wall. It was another airlock, the right side of the small cube pushed in. The source of the constant thudding was now apparent: four undead pounding on the glass door creating a slowly spreading spider web of cracks. They were crowded into the airlock, trying to break the door down. Three wore lab coats, and looked as newly dead as the ones the team had encountered in the hallway. The fourth was barefoot with a pair of cutoff jeans and a ragged, fluid-spattered T shirt. It was also putrescent and impossible to tell what race or gender it had been, although it had long hair hanging in filthy strings. Its skin was a shiny black and pieces of its flesh were being left behind as it smacked the glass, the right hand worn to nothing but yellowish bone, the top portion of its fingers missing.

  The living men checked their position, nothing was behind them and all the doors were closed except for the one that had been smashed in. The lab area the men occupied was as trashed as the one up front had been, equipment broken, and blood on everything. Rick and Dallas kept an eye out behind and to their respective sides as Seyfert moved forward. He stepped to the side of the first lab-coated zombie and shot it in the side of the head. It crumpled instantly. The ratcheting mechanism on the suppressed weapon was an odd sound in the partially enclosed area, and the shot was louder than Seyfert liked but the three remaining undead either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Seyfert shot the gooey one next, and then the other two. None had turned to look at him even when their fellows fell.

  After making sure they were truly dead, Seyfert glanced in the window of the last lab. A large machine, with a short arm and small dome on the end of the arm, looked like a giant old-style hair dryer. It held a single occupant, a struggling zombie strapped in tight. Two corpses, one wearing a lab coat and one not were splayed on the floor in the room as well, and two more animated corpses were strapped down on gurneys to the far right.

  Dallas and Seyfert pulled the re-killed zombies from the airlock as Rick stood watch. “Stair team this is Lead, SITREP, over?”

  “Twelve Limas down, three restrained. Breaching the lab now.”

  “That leaves one Lima unaccounted for, seaman.”

  “Copy that, Lead, we are toes down. Another SITREP in three, out.”

  Seyfert looked at both his friends, nodded, and smacked his weapon barrel against the cracked pane of the airlock. The creature strapped in the machine became more agitated, but that was it, nothing else came stumbling. “Double shit,” the SEAL said. He ran Henry’s card past the reader and the cracked glass slid to the right. “Anybody home?” he asked.

  A disheveled female zombie stood up from behind a rack of computer components in the back of the room. “Dammit,” Seyfert said, and began to aim his weapon.

  The creature raised its hands as well. “Don’t shoot, please,” croaked the timid voice.

  Rick and Dallas looked at each other in awe.

  Seyfert raised his eyebrows, but lowered his rifle. “Actual, we’ve got a live one.”

  37

  Ravi and Brenda were all smiles as their friend wolfed down a bowl of beef flavored ramen noodles. Dr. Linda Martin had quite a story to tell. The lab folk up on the seventh floor had been experimenting on the undead they had captured. One had broken loose of its bonds somehow and clamped its teeth on the neck of one of the students leaning over it. The student had succumbed to her injuries within minutes and turned quickly. She had bitten two others while they fought her, and in the ensuing madness, Dr. Venn, the artificial intelligence specialist, dropped to the floor and died as well, probably from a heart attack. He also turned quickly, but he decided to come back with upgrades, and he sprinted around the lab tearing into every living person he could find, infecting and killing the rest of the students and post-docs.

  Linda was able to get inside the magno lab, but as she did so, two of her infected colleagues also gained access while chasing her. She put them both down with a fire axe, but there were several more shuffling around, and Dr. Venn was running everywhere, spitting and destroying anything he could.

  Ravi, Brenda, and Phil had been downstairs on the sixth floor when all this had happened. When they came back up, they noticed their former friends and colleagues on the other side of the airlock were dead, so they assumed the worst and gave up on the lab, quietly escaping back downstairs without being noticed. The magno lab is devoid of any type of phones or intercom system, as communication equipment can interfere with the instruments, so Linda was trapped. Dr. Martin did what any scientist would do in her situation – she continued working.

  “I made some discoveries,” she told them, “not the least of which is that the alpha and theta waves of an AD’s brain are off the charts. More than that, not only are the ADs devoid of beta waves, they focus on them! I believe that’s how a blind AD with headphones on can track a human being.”

  “What’s an AD?” Dallas asked aloud.

  Dr. Martin looked at him strangely. “An ambulatory deceased. What do you call them?”

  “I call ‘em pus-bags, but them military folks calls em Lima Deltas, or jus’ Limas.”

  “Interesting. I like it. Anyway, as I was saying, Limas (she looked at Dallas) don’t breathe, so they can’t smell, so it isn’t our scent that attracts them. I removed the eyes of the one I was testing, and covered its ears with headphones, and filled its nostrils with silicone caulking, but whenever I got close it turned its head toward me. It knew where I was. It always knew where I was. It was reacting to some other sti
muli. Then I tested its brain waves and voila! The alpha and theta waves, which are associated with the mundane tasks we do, or outright sleep, were off the charts. It didn’t make any sense!”

  “Neither do dead people walking,” interjected Seyfert as he tossed his suppressor on the floor, “but I’m used to it.” He removed another steel tube from his load-bearing vest and screwed it in place.

  “There’s more,” Dr. Martin continued. “I have had this theory for years about beta waves. The betas from one person have a frequency and amplitude relatively the same as the next person. Stick two people in a room together, and the frequency and amplitude of the signals don’t change, but the power of the signal is amplified to approximately four point five times what it was with one person, meaning the sum of the power of the waves is greater than just two people should generate.”

  Everyone, including Ravi and Brenda, just stared at her. Phil was nodding his head like he understood, but he stared too.

  “This means that the more people you have together, the stronger the power potential of beta waves. The Limas (she looked at Dallas again) find prey primarily through sound, but once they are in range of someone, two feet maybe, then can find them without using the five senses we use, and the more people, the farther away the signal travels! A large group of people would generate a significantly stronger signal.”

  “Excellent,” Seyfert chortled, “wonderful. So the more people we have with us, the more danger we’re in. This also means that enclaves of survivors will throw off a big damn beacon for a free lunch.”

  Dr. Martin looked over the rim of her bowl as she finished gulping the last of her soup, “Correct. It also means that everyone who was in even a remote contact with a Rama infected individual or computer would be instantly infected themselves, and capable of transmitting the virus unknowingly.” She wiped her face with a napkin. “I’ve also got a theory on the faster creatures.”