The Lost Castle

by Nick Cole

  Malloy had nodded toward the candle at the top corner of the house. That was where Frank was to go.

  To clean.

  He follows stairs barely dressed in old threadbare carpet up through the gloom of the old place. He hears someone murmuring. A louder voice. The voice of the mobster. The monster. A man who’d said his name was Nials Abruzzi. That band saw, wise-guy, know-it-all, big-talker voice.

  Then a loud smack.

  Someone softly crying.

  The stunner in the silver dress?

  And that mobster laughing. It’s a cruel, harsh, machinegun laugh. And Frank hates it.

  Frank stares into the darkness of the hall stretching away from him at the top of the staircase. A hall ending in a door. And a candle that must be waiting behind it in the night.

  The mobster is coming out the door, silk slacks and nothing else when Frank is halfway up the hall with the forty-five. A soft tread. A creeping-through-the-jungle mind-the-trip-wires and watch-for-gooks tread when the guy spots him. For a long brief moment, it seems as though time stops and so desperately wants to start again. They stare at each other. The mobster begins to shut the door. Shirtless. His mouth a sneer. His eyes alight even in the darkness. And Frank. Frank holding the forty-five in front of him.

  The forty-five huffs on a breathy whisper as Frank squeezes the trigger and hits the guy in the jaw.

  Headshot.

  Except the guy doesn’t go down. He goes back and to the left. When he staggers back up, the lower half of his face is missing. Frank sees that in all its gruesome clarity as the man ducks back into the room and slams the door.

  Frank advances swiftly, closing on the door. He kicks it open with one foot, scans the room, ready to throw himself back outside, and sees the guy going for his coat. Frank fires again and hits the stumbling man in the lower back, blowing a massive portion of his stomach and upper intestines against the floor in front of the mobster. The monster with half a face. But the guy is still moving. Pulling a snub-nosed pistol from his jacket on a table.

  Frank fires again and puts one through the guy’s shoulder. On the far side of the heart.

  Nials Abruzzi turns, a horror show of a half face and a missing jaw, leaking black entrails slithering out onto the floor. And Frank sees that the bullet to the shoulder has blown open the chest cavity where the heart waits.

  “Shoot him in the head,” he hears a woman screaming behind him. Except it’s not any kind of fearful screech. It’s an order. Like a DI from Basic. Or that “every day” Marine LT back in ‘Nam when the gooks were coming out of the jungle and everything was going to hell.

  The nickel-plated snub-nosed is coming up, and Frank fires three more times.

  HUFF

  HUFF

  HUFF

  All three in the top of the skull and eyes, following the body with the shots as it falls to the floor until he’s standing over the guy to put the last one through a wide horror-struck eye that’s somehow full of promised menace.

  Distantly, Frank thinks, one bullet left.

  But the guy on the floor isn’t moving anymore.

  He turns to see the beauty from the club in bed, sheets pulled up around generous curves. Not terror. Her look is one of cool appraisal.

  “Get out!” she orders him, and Frank leaves, feeling numb. Malloy is at the front door at the bottom of the stairs holding two gas cans. A moment later he’s splashing them all over the old furniture. He sets the cans down business-like and takes the gun from Frank. He unscrews the silencer and slips it into one of the pockets of his white dinner jacket and then the gun disappears into another.

  “Go sit in the car.”

  Frank looks up to see the beauty coming down the stairs, holding her heels. At the bottom she turns her back to Frank.

  “Zip me please.”

  Frank sees soft skin and scratch marks as he draws the zipper up along her shapely back. She turns to him.

  “You did good,” she tells him flatly and leaves, heading toward the car. Malloy jerks his head, indicating that Frank should follow. He’s holding a zippo lighter.

  Dawnlight is beginning to show through the fog outside as the dangerous beauty pads out to the tiny Citroen under the pre-dawn gray trees. She enters the back seat and closes the door. Halfway across the gravel park, Frank turns and sees silent orange flames leaping through the dark windows of the villa.

  And a moment after Malloy has come out, wiping his hands and smiling some sort of self-satisfied job done smile, they’re in the car and speeding back along the coast as dawn rises in the east.

  That was the first time Frank had cleaned. The beginning of all bad things, he thinks now, as he hacks his way through a press of corpses in unit twenty-seven. Clustering dead, rotting and scabby, pushing forward, mindless and angry. Busted teeth and broken arms reaching out for him and Dante.

  Headshots.

  Axes working methodically. Slamming into skulls with fierce downward heaves.

  Next to him, Dante is putting too much into each blow. He knows the kid will be winded in no time. But at least the zombies on the stairs below and along the once-family room turned horror-show of wounds and half-faces, and smelling of rot and death, are going down for good.

  Frank uses the pick of the fire axe to pulp skulls with an economy of movement he knows will keep him in the game much longer. Maybe even to the end of this day turning quickly from bad to worse.

  They enter the kitchen and brain three of the zombies, nearing the gaping hole and shattered remains of the plywood barrier they’d erected on a day none of this had ever been imagined. Or feared.

  Except, thinks Frank, why did we think we were doing this? We must have known all along it would come to this. Eventually.

  But you hope, don’t you? You hope bad things will never happen to you. Don’t you?

  Dante’s breathing is a raspy gasp and the axe isn’t working as fast as before. Frank knows the kid is at the edge. The limit. In a moment, Dante’s arms won’t even be able to lift the axe once the burst of NFL Game Day adrenaline fades.

  “Go get the metal!” orders Frank. “I got this!”

  Dante hesitates.

  “Hurry!”

  Frank pulps the skull of a guy who looked like he could’ve been in a rock band, except for the torn flesh across his scalp and missing clumps of hair.

  “Now!”

  The townhome is clear, but more are trying to crawl through the gap. Beyond its opening Frank can see there aren’t that many, so that means the other diversions, including Ash no doubt on the other side of the wall, out there with them, are working.

  Frank uses the spike at the tip of the axe to finish the ones just beyond the gap and a few minutes later a sweating, cursing Dante drops the sheet of thick metal across the open gap.

  Instantly the sound of lifeless slapping hands ring out along its width, threatening to push it inward.

  “Hold it, kid!” shouts Frank, as he works the pneumatic drill and gets the sheet anchored back into the structure. He uses the bolts and in time, the discordant chorus of hand strikes seem distant and harmless, and more importantly, on the other side.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The convoy approached the El Cajon Pass. Beyond the pass, a long stretch of high desert waste would open up and eventually lead into Riverside and Orange County beyond. Along the coast, just inland, lay Objective Iron Castle.

  The zekes could be seen, moving in large swarms across the dry wastelands, suddenly turning to rush hopelessly after the convoy moving at forty-five miles an hour along the interstate, arms flailing as they mindlessly gave chase.

  The convoy passed gas stations that had burned down to the twisted metal black flower petals of exploded pumps, and fast food restaurants where the dead wandered aimlessly amid the burnt cars in the parking lots.

  Around a large wa
rehouse, a swarming sea of infected clustered and seemed to care less whether the distant convoy was passing or not. They were too intent on whoever was within. Waiting for help that would never come.

  Braddock could see shooters on the roof of a warehouse. Civilians with tricked-out M-14s firing into the crowd like it was some shooting gallery at a county fair. He could seem them laughing in the close-up of his ‘nocs. The looks on their faces were almost crazed.

  Not for long, he thought, knowing no one ever has all the ammunition they’ll ever need. Especially if you’re wasting it on target practice just for giggles. Surrounded. But maybe that was the point. Maybe they knew the score. Now they were intent on having a little fun for as long as what remained was left to them.

  At the top of the El Cajon Pass, a train burned alongside a rocky slope leading to the high mountains above, ruptured fuel cars on fire.

  Back toward the east, the direction they’d come from, the sky had begun to grow dark. Braddock angled his rearview mirror and saw the haboob. A real one this time. A massive desert storm boiling out of the dead wastelands and iron gray mountains, swallowing everything with its apocalyptic brown front.

  Except it wasn’t your typical haboob. The kind he’d seen in the deserts he’d fought in. Iraq. And Iran.

  Yes, it was that standard dust brown front... but deep within lay darker clouds that seemed to boil and burst like pustulent sudden sores erupting. And as soon as you saw them within the storm, they were gone.

  What was it Brees had said back at the base? In the night before they left.

  “There’s things out there, Cap. You can almost see ‘em movin’ in the night. Way out beyond the perimeter.”

  “Flash, flash, flash...” called out someone over the net. “Fast movers inbound.”

  A moment later, one of the vehicles in the rear of the convoy, an MRAP, exploded as an air to ground missile streaked in and punched straight through it.

  Two Navy gray F-18s streaked overhead and broke off in opposite directions.

  Braddock had seen this many times before. Except back then, he’d been the guy calling in the airstrike.

  “That dust storm’s all over us in the next five,” yelled Brees down from the turret. “Gotta hunker down, Cap.”

  “Scatter,” ordered Steele over the net, his voice distorting and breaking up with the approach of the massive desert sandstorm. The transmission faded in and out in sudden washes of static. “Seek cover in the nearby warehouses and buildings. Break up and keep well away from the other vehicles. Maintain radio silence and stay on this channel until the “all clear” is given, Warlord out.”

  “Gun it,” growled Braddock, as he tried to find the two F-18s streaking across the rocks and mountains surrounding the pass.

  Watt mashed the accelerator and pointed the Humvee toward an access road.

  “Break up! Break Up! Break up!” shouted Braddock over the net as he watched other vehicles continue to sit. “Do not engage with the Stingers until you have cover!”

  Forget about them, he thought. Everyone’s on their own for now.

  Remember...

  Darling.

  We’re here to kill Mr. Steele. That’s the real mission.

  Watt smashed the Hummer through a mesh gate and yanked the wheel. Zekes were all over the road leading alongside a series of wide warehouses. Sand and grit lashed the road ahead in sudden flaring temper tantrums of wind and dust.

  Brees spun up the minigun and raked the crowd ahead as they clustered in the vehicle’s path. Corpses came apart in dark gory sprays, shredded by Brees’ expert use of the lethal mounted death machine.

  “Where to, sir?” yelled Watt, suddenly spiking to life as everything got seriously real.

  Braddock was still trying to spot the F-18s.

  He had one for a second, but it dove behind the rock face of the highest mountain and didn’t come out the other side.

  “End of the road. Find a way into one of these warehouses.”

  They heard a distant explosion.

  “One of Bravo’s!” called Brees from the turret.

  At the end of the road, Watt yanked the wheel to the right and they skidded into a wide shipping yard. Trucks that would never again move waited in neat rows before a massive warehouse.

  Braddock pointed toward a loading ramp.

  “Over there. Lights on. Pull up to the ramp. Coombs... Harding... on me. Clear the loading dock and I’ll get the door open. Then we drive inside.”

  One of the jets streaked overhead, ripping the sky to shreds by the sound of it. There was a sudden loud hissing whoossssshh and a nearby explosion.

  Sand and trash started to swirl and twirl in the dry heat around the Humvee.

  Outside, Braddock checked his wingmen and moved up the ramp with his sidearm out. The wind moaned like a banshee, and a zeke stumbled down the dock to meet them as Harding stitched it with the SAW he was carrying. It spun and twirled into the metal siding of another roll-down door further down the dock.

  Braddock reached the door and looked for some kind of opening mechanism. Lever. Latch. Handle.

  It seemed to rise a bit as he pushed on it, but then stopped. He saw a huge padlock.

  He shot it with his pistol and it broke apart. A quick kick and the busted pieces disintegrated.

  Outside in the parking lot, dead swarmed through the open gate as the first strands of the haboob began to cover them in skirling dust.

  He pushed upward on the roll-down door once more.

  It still would not rise.

  Chainsaw.

  He was back to the Humvee and pulling the chainsaw out of the cargo deck.

  “Engaging!” yelled Brees, and cut down the zekes swarming into the yard not twenty feet away. Volcanoes of dust erupted around them as rounds shattered and crushed the stumbling corpses while disintegrating the concrete all around into dust and large flying chunks.

  Back at the door, Braddock fired up the chainsaw and cut into the seam where he suspected someone had barred it from within.

  A quick snap indicated a small bar had been cut, and Braddock leaned hard into the roll-top door to push the massive door open. Coombs helped while Harding cut down zekes to the right and left of the loading dock.

  It was up, and Braddock led the Humvee into the darkness with the chainsaw still running.

  “Shut the door. Brees, get your NVGs on. Watt, kill the headlights in thirty seconds.”

  Braddock waited and watched the thick darkness of the sweltering warehouse, waiting for the dead to come rushing out at them from the shadows.

  His chainsaw was idling.

  They’d come for the sound of it. Come for him.

  He saw something moving in the darkness. A quick shadow.

  “NVGs up!” shouted Brees. “Watt, kill the lights and I’ll turn ‘em on.”

  This is as dangerous as it gets, thought Braddock, peering into the closing darkness. Surrounded. Perimeter unsecured and a guy with a minigun at your back.

  Things could go from real bad to plain awful in a heartbeat. Miniguns that spat out adult-sized doses of 7.62 at 5000 rounds a minute were unforgiving that way.

  It would all be over then. It wouldn’t be your problem anymore, Darling.

  It was her voice.

  From the portal.

  Department 19. His handler.

  What, he thought, and didn’t mean to. Waiting. Waiting for it to all go gunfire and bad in the darkness.

  Total darkness now. He heard the hum of the turret as Watt swiveled and scanned. Waiting to engage...

  What wouldn’t be my problem anymore, he asked her.

  Saving the world.

  Darling.

  If you’re dead... it’s not your problem anymore.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The closer Jesus and Holida
y got, the larger the chromescent edifice seemed to become as it rose higher and higher into the air above them. As though some visual trick had been played after they’d first seen it from the dry hills above. Now it loomed above them like some gleaming, fat, top-heavy cake of steel-frosted swirls and alien symmetry. A wedding cake for robots.

  The base had once been home to the Marine Corps 3rd Air wing. F-18 Super Hornets and C-130s had streaked away from it at full military power, ever ready to do battle in the skies above against oppressors foreign and domestic.

  But for many years after the Clinton-era savaging of the military, the base had lain fallow and silent. Each passing season added yet more broken window panes or some rusty section of fence falling into tall weeds and motionless dead grass.

  To Holiday, it had been that way forever and always would be. Or at least that had been his memory of it in the times he had driven past, coming home from some late-night pub crawl down in Newport.

  When, he wondered, staring up at the gargantuan tower. When had all this happened? When had the massive chromescent thing, more wide oblong tower than anything else, with swirls of bent steel and sweeping gleaming curves of no apparent purpose, when had it been built? Holiday could not remember ever seeing any sort of construction going on here. It would’ve taken years to build such an alien structure. And it was alien compared to the rest of the easy-living, stucco-covered hacienda-style planned communities of Irvine. This area was almost exclusively communities well-known for their meticulous planned-scapes of houses all seeming just the same.

  A tall security fence like something from a World War II concentration camp lined the perimeter, stretching off into the fields surrounding the old base. Those fields, recalled Holiday, had always been managed. Crops, from tomatoes to bell peppers and Serrano chilies, had been raised and harvested there despite the base’s derelict nature. Even now, some sort of crop lay out there in the gentle swells and rises of land leading toward the big freeways of the 5 and 405. Beyond the Stalag 17 fencing lay another even taller fence sheathed in green mesh like the kind surrounding tennis courts.

  At vast intervals, hexagonal cyberpunk guard towers with vicious looking mounted machineguns glared down into the hot morning. Silence overwhelmed everything. No birds. No imperceptible white noise blur of unseen insects. Nothing. Nothing but the quiet thrum of barely detected power, pulsing from some deep source unrevealed.