The main problem was going to be the soldiers standing guard near the vehicles, all armed and rifles at the ready.
“Nothin’ to it,” Brandt said, pushing his foot on the gas pedal harder. The truck’s engine roared louder in response. While the soldiers beyond the gate yelled out in alarm and raised their weapons to point them at his truck, the truck’s grill slammed into the chain link fencing. There was a squeal of metal against metal, and then the fence gave way, the sharp edges of the chain link scratching against his truck with the high-pitched sound of dozens of nails against chalkboards. Brandt cringed, ducking his head lower, the sound of bullets striking his truck adding to the cacophony around him, praying that a well-placed bullet wouldn’t disable his truck. He could barely see over the dashboard, he was hunched so low in his seat, but he could see well enough to aim for the gap in the vehicles. The passenger window shattered, and a bullet barely missed his head, crashing out through the driver’s side window.
Then he was through the gap between the trucks and crashing through a set of wooden barricades, and his truck bounced as if it had bumped over something. He didn’t want to know what it was; it had resembled the shape and size of a human body, but he was going to pretend that it was a speed bump for his sanity’s sake. He sped down the street outside the CDC, weaving in and out of traffic, his heart hammering in his chest.
Once he found himself free of the CDC facilities and racing down the street away from them, his heart rate began to return to normal and his brain started to slow down. Brandt rubbed at his face with one hand and focused on the street, taking in his surroundings with an eye for the finer details. What he saw nearly made him pull over in shock.
The houses, storefronts, and office buildings lining the street appeared to have been under some sort of attack. Many had blown-out windows, and their front façades were pocked with bullet holes. Surprisingly, none of them looked to have been looted. A row of bodies lay in front of a home, lined up execution-style in the grass; toward the end of the block, another house burned, and more bodies lay in front of it, unattended by anyone. Cars were parked haphazardly along either side of the road, most of them looking like they’d been towed out of the middle of the road to clear a path, perhaps for the military guys that Brandt had left behind. It was likely thanks to them that he was even able to get his truck through the mess to head towards Emory.
The closer he got to the school, though, the faster things were falling apart. Cars littered the street, and in some places, they were positioned in a manner that suggested the way they blocked the road was intentional. It didn’t take long until Brandt hit the point where he was forced to ease the truck to a stop. Ahead of him was a roadblock built out of concrete highway dividers, reflective barrels, and cars parked against it hood-first. Barbed wire lined the top of the barricades, preventing them from being climbed over easily. Brandt shifted the truck into park and opened the door, sliding out to the pavement and walking up to the roadblock. The concrete barricades extended from one side of the street to the other, up over the sidewalk, and against the buildings on either side of the street. There was no way he was getting through there. He was going to have to find another way around, but going to another street would take too much time. He started assessing the buildings that formed the sides of what almost appeared to be a funnel into the roadblock.
The building to his left was a clothing store, and an additional car parked against its front doors blocked the way. On the right was what appeared to be a college textbook store; its front doors were only chained and padlocked shut. He couldn’t help the grin that tried to cross his face. “Perfect,” he whispered, and he turned and went back to his truck.
The toolbox mounted to the back of his truck was locked, but it took him only seconds to retrieve his keys from the truck’s ignition and unlock it. He grabbed the crowbar from inside it, then scanned over everything else inside. There was a wide variety of tools stuffed inside the box, and any of them could have been of use to him, but he didn’t want to be loaded down with too much weight in case he found himself having to move quickly.
After a moment’s hesitation, Brandt grabbed the bolt cutters and tucked the crowbar under his belt to free up his hands. He walked across the bed of his truck and stood on the opened tailgate, turning in a slow circle, scanning his surroundings for any oncoming dangers. When he didn’t see anything, he dropped down from the back of his truck and headed for the bookstore.
He stopped in front of the bookstore, slid the blades of the bolt cutters around a section of the chain, and squeezed. The chain snapped, and he set the bolt cutters down to pull the chain out of the door handles. He cut the chain down to a manageable length, keeping the padlock on the end of it to use as a weapon, and draped it over his shoulder, then pushed the doors open. At the same time, he drew the pistol Derek had given him and raised it to a two-handed ready position. He stepped into the store, letting the door shut behind him, and examined the interior.
The textbook store looked like it had been commandeered and converted into a miniature base of operations. The bookshelves had been moved, shoved toward the back of the store and the side walls to clear the center for its new additions: tables and dozens of chairs, all covered over with scattered papers and Toughbooks. A radio was on the cash counter, but there were no lights lit up on it to indicate that the unit was turned on. He went to it and examined it for a second, trying to figure out how that particular model worked, then twisted a few knobs, searching for any transmissions. When he didn’t hear anything, he gave up and turned the radio off, figuring the antenna had been either damaged or taken when the unit that had clearly been here had left.
He pushed away from the register and headed for the side of the store that was on the opposite side of the barricade, intending to search for a door that led into the street. It took him two passes around the entire perimeter of the store before he found an employee exit on the side of the store. It was blocked by a bookshelf and stacks of biology books, as if the unit that had presumably been in the store had been trying to keep something out. As far as he could tell, the door was the only way out. He tucked his pistol back into its holster, leaving the safety loop unbuckled so he could get to it quickly if necessary, and began to haul textbooks out of the way, moving as many as he could carry at once, shoving them all aside from the door enough to leave a path for him to get through. Once the bookshelf was moved, he discovered that the door itself was held shut by only a simple deadbolt, and, more ominously, the glass set in the door was smeared with blood.
“Good God, what is going on here?” Brandt whispered, pressing the fingers of his right hand lightly against the door. It looked for all the world like someone who had been injured had been banging against the door, maybe begging to be let inside. He hoped that whatever had injured said person wasn’t still standing outside the door waiting on someone to emerge. The mental image of someone like Alicia attacking people slid through his mind. He shook it off and focused on the task at hand. He had to get to Olivia before it was too late; he didn’t have time to think about anything else.
The door opened up onto a narrow alleyway between the bookstore and the next building over, almost too narrow to be called an alley. His shoulders nearly brushed against the brick walls on either side of him, and he immediately started to feel claustrophobic in the tight space. He tried to focus on his surroundings, which was difficult, as the sun hadn’t risen high enough to cast its light into the alley yet, and he wished he had a flashlight. Walking over the uneven ground, he couldn’t see exactly what it was that his boots were squishing through, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what it was he’d stepped in.
He made it to the end of the alley without incident and stopped, dumbfounded, at the sight before him.
It looked like a major battle had taken place in the middle of the street. Automatic weapons fire had left pockmarks all over the sides of the buildings and the barricade built across the street, and glass
from the buildings on either side of the street littered the pavement. Several bodies, both civilian and military, were sprawled on the street and slumped against the Humvees parked against the barricade, and a tank sat in the middle of the street twenty yards back from the Humvees. Everything around it was motionless. Brandt eased toward the closest of the bodies and gave it a onceover.
It was a sergeant, probably in his early thirties if Brandt had to guess, and his nametag read, “Parker.” Parker was dressed in a camouflage-printed MOPP 4 suit-up, though his gas mask, helmet, and hood had been removed and dumped to the pavement beside him. His right sleeve was bloodied and torn, and a neat bullet hole was in the center of his forehead. A spray of blood and brain matter on the Humvee’s driver’s door behind him suggested he’d been shot where he was sitting. Brandt pulled the knife Derek had given him out and used the blade to push the man’s sleeve aside.
The man had been bitten on his forearm, and a closer inspection revealed that it was a human bite. It looked to have oozed a decent quantity of blood, which had soaked through the torn sleeve of the MOPP 4 suit and the uniform shirt beneath it, though it was a surprisingly clean wound. Whoever had bitten him had barely broken the skin. The man didn’t appear to be wounded anywhere else, besides the bullet hole in his head, and it was such a clean shot that Brandt’s first thought was that it had been an execution. What was going on that would prompt someone to shoot this man in the head?
Brandt looked over the other seven bodies in the street nearby, and he discovered that they’d all been given the same treatment as the soldier: all had been shot in the head, and each of them had been bitten at least once by another human.
His mind immediately went back to Alicia, her bloodied, chewed-up lips, the crazed look in her eyes, the way she’d grasped at him so desperately, and he wanted to throw up. Was Alicia sick? Did she have something contagious that had somehow spread out of the CDC and gotten among the general population? It had to be; that was the only thing he could come up with that would explain the way these people had been executed. He looked at the concrete barricades with fresh eyes and took a step back from them.
This was a quarantine zone. And he’d just walked into it.
Chapter 13
The sun had fully risen by the time Brandt got over his initial horror, casting its cloudy, watery light over the street, illuminating the bloodied sideshow for Brandt to see that much better. He walked down the street at a brisk jog, stepping around fresh bodies and smears of blood and gore, his nerves on edge from the expectancy of something bursting out of the shadows between the buildings or from underneath cars to grab him and make him wish for a bullet in his own head.
He stopped at a street corner to catch his breath and study his surroundings. There was a wrecked car blocking the sidewalk, where it had run off the road and crashed into the brick façade of a pizza parlor. The front quarter panel on the passenger side was peppered with bullet holes, and the windows on that side were shattered. A large pool of blood stained the car’s front upholstery. He ducked lower to look inside the car; there was no sign of the vehicle’s former owners.
There was a noise on the other side of the car.
Brandt slid his Beretta out of its holster. He eased toward the trunk of the car, his pistol raised, finger resting lightly against the trigger in preparation to shoot if necessary. He circled the back of the car and saw what was on the other side, and a gasp escaped his throat.
The college co-ed didn’t appear to be more than twenty-one. Her blonde hair was matted with blood, her arms broken, bones sticking out through the skin. Her Emory University sweatshirt was soaked through with blood and motor oil. Everything from the middle of her torso down was mutilated, crushed by the car that had plunged off the street and crashed into the pizza parlor. It wasn’t her appearance that had horrified Brandt so much as the fact she was still alive.
Once he was within arm’s reach of the girl, she lifted her head from the pavement and looked up at him through eyes clouded by the haze of death. She made a low, growling noise in her throat and stretched her broken arms out toward him. The fingers of her left hand struck his boot, and he took a step back, further out of her reach. The skin on her fingertips was missing, scraped off to the first knuckle, nearly down to the bone; eight thin streaks on the sidewalk suggested she’d been clawing at it in an attempt to free herself from where she was pinned under the vehicle.
“Jesus,” Brandt said under his breath.
The girl jerked into full alertness at the sound of his voice, and she started trying to drag herself out from under the car with renewed vigor. Brandt watched her, trying to figure out how she was still moving when her injuries should have meant death. She made another growling noise and jerked forward, and he heard something that sounded like fabric tearing. Then she lurched toward him just far enough to touch his shoe again, and he backed away another step, turned, and ran.
The blonde co-ed was the only person he saw moving during his entire trip to Emory University and through campus to his sister’s apartment building. Everywhere he looked, there were dead bodies. Old, young, male, female, students, teachers, all sprawled out where they’d died. Emory residents by the dozens had been hauled out of their beds, dragged out of classes, pulled from their cars, and lined up on the streets and sidewalks and pristine grassy lawns of the university, and each of them had been gifted with a bullet to the backs of their heads, execution-style. Just like the soldier and the other seven bodies at the barricade he’d been forced to stop at, save for the fact that none of these bodies had bite marks anywhere on them. Brandt checked every slight, dark-haired young woman he passed, searching for his sister’s face and hoping like hell that he wouldn’t find her facedown in the grass.
With every passing body, Brandt could feel a darkness seeping into his soul, one thin tendril at a time. He’d never seen anything like it, not like this. Not this unceasing line of bodies, all lying abandoned where they’d died—been murdered, he mentally corrected—not even when he’d been on his tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d never been one of those soldiers unfortunate enough to come across signs of a massacre, until now, when he found himself walking through what appeared to be the pits of Hell itself.
Olivia’s apartment building loomed in front of him, seven stories tall, casting bluish shadows over the front lawn, where more bodies lay in groups. Unlike the others, who looked like they’d been forced to kneel on the grass before being shot, these appeared to have been shot while standing up. Their bodies lay crumpled in haphazard positions, laying the way they’d fallen. When he saw the building’s shattered front windows and the corpses, he broke into a run, barely casting a glance on the bodies he jumped over and dodged around, aiming for the front doors.
He slowed down as he approached them, wary of any impending dangers. He held his pistol with his right hand, fumbling in his pocket with his left, pulling out the cell phone he hadn’t bothered to even look at yet. He powered it on and nudged at the front door with his foot, rattling it on its hinges. It appeared to be unlocked. He started to reach toward the door handle when something slammed against the inside of the door.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelped involuntarily. He staggered back from the door, dropping his cell phone and raising his pistol in a two-handed grip.
A young man was pressed against the bullet-resistant glass, slapping at it with both palms, smearing blood all over the panes. He opened his mouth wide, revealing teeth that were as bloodied as his hands. Though he couldn’t hear him, Brandt didn’t think it was beyond the realm of reason to assume the man was making the same growling noise the young woman pinned under the car had been making.
It was useless to try to shoot the man through the door; the black webbing in the glass told him that much. But he had to get inside, and he couldn’t just walk past the man drooling at the door. He didn’t know the building to search for another entrance, though he was sure there was one somewhere. He didn’t want to spend
the time hunting it down, anyway; getting to his sister felt too urgent.
No one else had joined the bloody man at the door, which gave Brandt some assurance that the man was the only one inside. He edged closer to the door, keeping his pistol aimed on the skinny figure on the other side, his adrenaline surging. He kicked the door open, swinging it inward on its hinges until it slammed into the bloody man and knocked him backward. He staggered into the short flight of steps that led to the first floor and fell on them in an uncoordinated sprawl.
Remembering how all the bodies he’d seen to this point had had bullet holes in their heads, Brandt strode forward and aimed his pistol down at the young man’s head. The man lurched upward, his hands outstretched. Brandt squeezed his finger on the trigger.
The gunshot echoed off the concrete walls and tiled floors, and the back of the young man’s head blew out over the steps, splattering in a spray across the stairs and floor. Brandt stayed standing where he was, waiting to see if anyone else was going to come out of the woodwork and try to attack him after the sharp report of the gunshot. When no one was forthcoming, he started for the stairwell door, slipping through it and easing it shut behind him.
The stairwell wasn’t as dark as he’d thought it would be, which was surprising. He looked up the stairwell and saw that there was a window on each of the landings, letting in enough light to illuminate the stairs in the event of a power outage. Brandt sent up a silent prayer for the architects’ foresight and started up the stairs, taking them two at a time, pausing at each landing to check the one above before advancing.
Origins (The Becoming Book 6) Page 8