by Luke Duffy
“What do you think this place was, Stan?” He asked, leaning in over the threshold of the gateway but reluctant to step through.
“We should all know,” Stan replied and received a number of quizzical looks in return. They had no idea of what the place was.
“Through there,” Stan continued and nodded to the second set of blast proof doors at the far end, “is our old headquarters.”
The rest of his men turned and shot him a look. After a moment they realised that Stan was right. They had not recognised the place without the bright lights that were fitted into the ceiling and constantly blazing overhead. They were also used to seeing it from a different angle, from along one of the corridors branching off to the left and right of the main entrance. They had never approached the bunker through the underground rail tunnels. Guards were normally posted on either side of the doorway, controlling access in and out while a continuous flurry of men and women were always moving in different directions along the passageways. Now the place was silent, dark, and unrecognisable as the former hiding place of their command centre.
They moved through the gate and towards the bunker doors. Nothing but blackness greeted them from the other side of the complex’s entrance. Even the beams of light aimed through the doorway seemed to be swallowed up in the thick blanket of darkness. The place had become an unmarked grave for the people who had failed to make it out when the command centre was overrun.
Stan looked over the door and its locking mechanisms. Bloodied claw marks with human nails that had been broken off and became embedded in the thick congealed blood covered the outer surfaces. Thousands of hands had pounded against the barrier in their attempts to break in but the entry point would never have given way against a million bodies pressing against it.
The bunker had once been part of Winston Churchill’s underground labyrinth during the Second World War and later, a nuclear fallout shelter designed to withstand a direct hit on the city above and keep the remains of the government safe below ground. It was virtually impervious to a direct assault, even with explosives.
The heavy deadbolt locks that were made from titanium appeared to be untouched and undamaged. Stan stepped back and grunted in realisation that someone had opened the doors from the inside or possibly by remote, having broken through all the firewalls and sophisticated programming of the computerised security systems.
“What do you reckon, Stan?” Taff asked as he scanned his light over the ground around them. The beam glinted against something that reflected brightly in the otherwise inky darkness and he moved towards it. “Shit.”
Stan turned and saw Taff crouching down beside the remains of a body. There were a number of corpses lying around them but this one in particular was clearly different. It was armed and appeared to be fresh. As he moved closer, Stan recognised the man’s face. Most of the side of his head had been blown away but he could clearly see that it had once been the commander of the SAS team who had gone missing during the insertion. It was the same man who had slipped from the side of Werner’s U-boat and had almost been lost in the Thames. His weapon lay beside him, spattered with blood and grey matter while more of his skull’s contents decorated the wall directly behind the remains of his body. His limbs and internal organs had been ripped away and all that remained of him was his head, shoulders, and the upper part of his ribcage that was still protected and held together beneath his assault vest.
Taff reached down and picked something up that was lying beside the remains. It was a folder of some sort and filled with a thick bundle of laminated pages. He looked at the front of the beige coloured file and then turned it over, looking for a label of some sort. It was blank and gave no indication to what it was for.
“What do you think?” He asked as he passed it across to Stan who then began flicking through the pages that were filled with graphs, numbers, and diagrams. Stan knew exactly what the file was and what it was for.
“Launch codes,” he said, shaking his head as he stared down at the folder.
Taff looked at him with a raised eyebrow and then back at the weighty file of documents in Stan’s hand.
“They’re launch codes for ICBMs,” Stan clarified. “These poor bastards were obviously sent in to retrieve them from this death-trap.”
“Nukes? Why would they be in here looking for the codes to launch nuclear missiles? We have enough trouble as it is.”
Stan shrugged and turned to look back up at the open blast doors leading into the bunker complex.
“Maybe whoever opened this place up couldn’t find them, or never made it out?” He reasoned aloud. “Thompson may have sent these guys in to retrieve them before someone else did. We were all brought up to speed on that lunatic in the north, Gibson, wanting to use heavy nukes on all the cities. Maybe the Prince of Darkness was afraid he would find them down here and wanted to keep the codes from falling into the wrong hands?”
“So where’s the rest of the team?” Taff asked as he glanced back down at the pale ruined face of the SAS commander.
“All over the fucking place,” Marty’s voice replied from behind them.
Stan and Taff turned around and looked at the bodies that were sprawled throughout their immediate area. Marty was right, the SAS team were still there. They had been ripped apart by the infected and their body parts lay scattered and mixed with the corpses of their attackers. Clusters of bullet holes that had not been noticed sooner began to appear in the walls all around them and piles of empty brass cases carpeting the floor glinted in the beams of light. By the looks of things the SAS men had been caught unawares from all sides and trapped there, fighting it out with the undead until they steadily run out of ammunition and then took their own lives.
“Jesus, there must’ve been hundreds of those things in here,” the veteran gasped as he shone his light over the piles of corpses stretching in either direction along the two tunnels. “Poor bastards never had a chance.”
A noise in the passageway leading back into the tube tunnels made everyone spin around. There was something approaching them from within the darkness and the sounds of heavy scraping feet could be heard creeping towards them along the vaulted ceiling.
A loud bang to their right made everyone reel as one of the militia fired off a round. Its muzzle flash was like a bolt of lightning, flickering from the walls and blinding anyone that was facing in the general direction of the firer. The weapon’s report in the cramped space boomed and pressed violently against the eardrums of everyone, causing a flurry of gasps and curses as they instinctively raised their hands to the sides of their heads.
Stan was about to cry out, ordering everyone to hold fire, but a number of other rifles opened up almost immediately after the first. The airspace in front of the bunker’s entrance erupted with deafening cracks as the militia began firing blindly into the darkness behind them. The veteran was screaming for them to cease-fire as he launched himself against the man who had been the first to pull his trigger. He slammed into him with his shoulder, flattening the civilian against the wall and ripping the magazine away from the rifle in his shaking hands. The man stared back at the veteran in terror for a moment as his weapon ceased firing.
The ear-splitting blasts of the weapons continued uncontrolled, illuminating the tunnel with flashes of brilliant white as glowing red tracer rounds spun away into the dark passages and ricocheted from the walls. Men and women alike were suddenly knocked from their feet as Stan and his men set about trying to bring the militia back under control and having no choice but to hit them with forceful open-handed slaps across the sides of their heads. Some of them dropped to the ground and others tumbled across the narrow space, colliding with the people beside them and either dropping their weapons or releasing their death grips on their triggers.
Behind them, as the militias fire began to whither, another series of loud snaps emitted. They were not the same booming reports of the SA-80 rifles that the civilian soldiers were carrying, but the muffled sound
s of a suppressed M-4.
Stan whirled and saw a figure standing close to the bunker doors and a rapid series of flashes blasting outwards from the rifle in its hands, firing a long burst into the dark opening. It was Bobby, shooting at something that was unseen to the others. There was another form at his feet. Its legs kicked frantically as it writhed and thrashed against the cluster of withered hands pulling it back into the doorway. Bobby reached down and grabbed one of the man’s legs and began attempting to pull the figure back towards himself while still firing his rifle into the gap between the bunker doors.
The man on the floor was Marty. He screamed with pain as he felt a set of incisors clamp around the soft tissue of his hand and begin crunching down on the bones of his fingers. The sharp searing pain of his flesh being torn was quickly mingled with the agony of digits being crushed and gnawed as he continued to fight to free himself from the multitude of hands that refused to let go. More of the infected began to pile in around him.
Bobby’s rifle continued to blast away at their attackers but it was not enough to stop them. His M-4 suddenly fell silent as the magazine became empty and he let it fall to his side, hanging from the sling attached to his harness. He drew his pistol and began to pump rounds into the heads of the infected. Some of them fell back beyond the doorway and others landed on top of himself and Marty. He could feel his body being pulled into the darkness beyond the threshold as he fought to tear himself free while keeping a tight grip on his friend’s leg. He could smell the rotting stench of the dozens of reanimated corpses that clamoured around him, pulling at his clothing and clawing his kicking legs as he tried to climb back to his feet while fending the infected away from Marty.
Another bright flash of pain flared in front of Marty’s eyes as the skin around his neck was torn and a large gaping wound began gushing with a torrent of blood. More teeth began sinking into his soft flesh as he was pulled away from Bobby and set upon by a mob of ravenous monsters. They tore and bit at him, digging their fingers into his soft tissue and biting at any part of him they could reach. His hand was suddenly pulled backwards and a large hole was ripped out from his wrist. Arterial blood instantly began to spray from the wound in long jets, coating the grotesque faces of the dead and driving them into a frenzy as they tasted the warm metallic life fluid of their victim. Marty howled again, his blood curdling screams echoing through the tunnels of the underground labyrinth.
Bull vaulted across the militia soldiers lying prostrate on the ground where they had been bowled over by the heavy whacks of the men behind them. He landed at Bobby’s side and instantly reached down for his friend who was half way in through the door, kicking and screaming as the dead piled in around him. Bull grasped Marty’s thrashing legs, and yanked him back into the tunnel and away from the bunker as Bobby scrambled backwards away from the entrance.
Without pausing, Bull swung his Minimi around and loosed off a long burst into the bodies that surged out from beyond the doorway, gnashing their teeth and growling angrily at the man who had taken their prey away from them. They fell into a heap beneath the hailstorm of fire that was thrown against them but there were more of them charging towards the entrance from the black depths of the bunker.
The rifles of the militia began to fire again. There was more movement in the passage behind them as wandering corpses lost in the tube tunnels began to converge on the sound of gunfire and the screams of the living.
Stan ran back over to Bull’s side and joined him in firing into the mass of bodies that were advancing on them from the corridor beyond the bunker doors. There must have been hundreds of them, climbing up from the lower floors and crawling over one another as they fought to reach the living above them.
The militia were beginning to fall back, fumbling with their rifles as they attempted to change out their magazines. As the fire faded from behind, faint shadows of disfigured bodies grew along the walls of the tunnel in the flickering light, accompanied by the long moans and gurgling howls of the advancing dead.
“Move right,” Stan screamed over his shoulder to the others as corpses began spilling out from their old headquarters. “Get into the tunnel on the right. We’re bugging out.”
Some of the militia, facing in the opposite direction from Stan, retreated into the wrong access channel. By the time that they realised their mistake, it was too late and their route back had already been cut off by a number of corpses that began charging into the tunnel after them. More screams echoed around the chamber as Stan and his men began to retreat.
One of the regular troops had been knocked over by the fleeing men and women and as he climbed back to his feet, he was set upon by a horde of the infected that spotted him in the dancing light that continued to flit around over the chamber. The blaring crackle of gunfire continued as both groups fled in different directions. The agony filled howls of men and women as they were slaughtered at the hands of the infected echoed along the tunnels for great distances, attracting the attention of the thousands of dead that were wandering through the subways.
Bull raced along the passageway with Marty slung over his shoulder while Taff helped Danny to hobble along through the long winding corridor. Behind them, Bobby, Stan, and the veteran covered the retreat, taking it in turns in throwing up a wall of zipping tracers into the avalanche of walking dead that were following close on their heels. Reaching a set of stairs and instantly recognising where he was in the narrow beam of light he held in his hand, Bull began climbing the steps. As he reached the second flight, the stairway below them was rocked by a bone crunching detonation. The ground shook and the grenade’s shrapnel thwacked and pinged against the walls as it flew out in all directions.
“Up, up,” Stan was shouting from below. “Keep going. Faster.”
By now, Bull should have been exhausted. He was carrying the entire weight of Marty, including both their equipment and climbing dozens of flights of stairs but he felt nothing in the way of fatigue or physical pain. His closest friend was hurt badly, slumped over his shoulder and bleeding severely from multiple wounds. At that moment, Bull could think of nothing but getting Marty to safety.
“You’re okay, Marty,” he said over and over again. “I’ve got you, mate. You’re going to be okay. Just hold on, Marty, for fuck sake.”
At the top of the stairs they burst out into the storeroom of a small independent book shop. The team had used that particular entrance into the bunker complex on many occasions. Bobby pushed ahead of them and took the lead through the main part of the store, striding over piles of scattered books and magazines and slamming the butt of his rifle into the side of the head of a single corpse that stood staring back at them, bewildered at their sudden appearance. The dead woman’s skull caved inwards as her body was sent flying across the floor and slamming into the wall.
Out in the street, Bobby began firing his rifle at the corpses that turned and lurched towards them. Bull crashed through the door and into the open, not bothering to stop and paying no attention to the misshapen figures that moved towards him. He turned and raced off to the left. Behind him, Taff and Danny emerged, closely followed by the two militia soldiers who had been tasked with helping their wounded comrade.
“Here,” Taff growled as he passed Danny across to them, “take him and run. Follow Bull and stay with him. Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Raising his rifle, Taff began to help Bobby clear a path as the wounded were evacuated from the area. Windows shattered from stray rounds and bodies dropped all around them but more appeared from around the various corners and from within the numerous doorways.
“Take a right,” Stan howled as he crashed into the street and followed after Bull and the others. The two militia were just ahead of him and complied with his orders as they reached the junction at the head of the street.
“Right, go right,” Peter called after Bull, passing the message on and watching as the big man made a change in his direction without a single glance backwards and disappeared
around the corner.
Bobby and Taff dropped back to protect the rear and followed in Stan’s wake. The veteran was still with them but he was limping badly, having caught some of the shrapnel in his leg from the grenade he had tossed into the tunnel in an attempt to stem the tide of infected snapping jaws that were chasing after them. His teeth were gritted and his face was creased with pain but he was determined to keep up, wielding his rifle in one hand while the other was pressed firmly against his bleeding thigh.
Bobby came alongside him and placed his arm under his shoulder for support and helping him to keep moving. Taff remained close and continued to cover them, firing in all directions as the infected sprang from every door, window, and alleyway. They reached the corner and saw Stan and the two militia soldiers with Danny just ahead of them. Below their feet, a trail of bright red blood spattered the pavement and far in front they glimpsed the back of Bull and the bouncing figure of Marty hanging from his shoulder. Nothing was standing in the way of the man and the few bodies that managed to get close enough were knocked to the side by his powerful blows.
“Stay with me, Marty,” Bull gasped as he slammed his fist into the face of another corpse. The body of the dead man was lifted high off its feet from the impact and hurled almost to the other side of the road. “I’ve got you, Marty. Everything’s going to be okay.”
A hundred metres further on and Bull came to an abrupt halt. Marty, severely weakened and barely able to form his words, had demanded that his friend put him down and after a brief argument, Bull reluctantly complied. As the rest of the men caught up, Bull began checking Marty’s wounds, trying valiantly to stem the flow of blood as the others formed a protective ring around them and began picking off the few corpses that were appearing in the immediate area.
“Leave it,” Marty groaned while shaking his head.