Left With The Dead

by Stephen Knight

  “Terminator, Falcon-roger all.”

  “Falcon, this is Terminator. Can you give me a rundown on current events, please? What’s the troop disposition? Over.”

  “Very quickly, Terminator. We have units who made it into the subway system, as you recommended. Radio contact with them is extremely sporadic, and it seems they can only make contact when they’re at a station…I guess because that’s where the ground is broken by the entrances to the stations or something like that. Contact with zed has been minimal, and so far, ninety-five percent of all the engagements have gone our way. Zed is definitely in the subway system, but not in great numbers, and like you said they’re not that great at nocturnal operations. Over.”

  “Falcon, Terminator. Glad to be of help. What else do you have for me? Over.”

  “Terminator, Falcon…not much else right now. We’ll talk again in sixty minutes, over.”

  Gartrell sighed. “Roger, Falcon. I’ll be back with you in sixty minutes. Terminator, out.”

  “What did they say?” Jolie asked.

  Gartrell pulled his headset off his ears and let it hang around the back of his neck. He reached for one of the plastic bottles of water on the small bureau and took a long pull from it before answering.

  “Helicopters haven’t arrived yet. Some light infantry units are pushing into the city through the subway tunnels, but there’s no way they can move any heavy equipment through the streets-everything’s blocked, by abandoned vehicles if not the stenches themselves.”

  “The ones coming through the subway tunnels…will they-”

  “I get the idea they’re on zed hunts. The Army probably wants to close down the tunnels as an escape point for the zombies. I doubt they’ll come up to the surface streets. And if they do, they won’t be doing it for us, it’ll be because they got chased out of the tunnels by a couple of thousand zeds. And then they’ll be in pretty much the same position we are.” Gartrell drank more water, then looked over his shoulder at the closet at the foot of the bed. He scooted over and pulled it open. A few boxes were inside, stacked against the wall. Gartrell pulled them out and tossed them on the bed, then knocked on the wall.

  “So you’re sure the apartment next door is empty?” he asked.

  “Yeah. The Skinners, they’re gone, like I said.”

  “Fantastic.” Gartrell rose and pushed past her. He walked into the living room and picked up the backpack with the tools inside, then headed back to the bedroom. Jolie followed him, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “What are you going to do, Dave?”

  Gartrell dumped the tools on the bed and picked out a small sledgehammer and several chisels. He then emptied the closet completely, tossing old men’s clothes on the floor.

  “I’m going to make us a place to fall back to in case the shit hits the fan.” He knocked on the wall several times, in different places. It felt solid to him, and he imagined he was faced with plaster over brick, or maybe cinderblock. That didn’t make things any easier, but he hadn’t expected it to be sheetrock. He picked up the sledgehammer and tapped it against the wall, and plaster fractured and fell away. Sure enough, there was red brick behind it. He looked over at Jolie.

  “You’re going to knock a hole through the wall?”

  “Like I said, we might need a place to fall back to. It won’t be much, but it’ll buy us some time. I’ll try to be as quiet as I can, but you might want to close the door behind you. Try and make sure Jaden doesn’t get too upset if he wakes up. All right?”

  “All right.” She stepped out of the small bedroom and slowly closed the door behind her.

  ###

  It took well over two hours since he had to keep the noise to a minimum, but Gartrell finally cut through the back of the closet and into the apartment next door. Jolie checked on him from time to time, and even Jaden showed up, watching Gartrell hack away at the wall with hammers and chisels. The plaster was gone within minutes; it took almost two hours to chisel through the mortar holding the bricks together, and then he had to pull those out one by one. He took a break to call Falcon on the hour, but there was still no news. Gartrell figured the public affairs officer on the other end of the radio really wasn’t plugged in to anything much at all, but there was nothing he could do about that other than continually plead his case and beg for information.

  Of course, the only thing that mattered were the helicopters, and they either hadn’t arrived or the 10th Mountain Division had more pressing priorities for them to attend to.

  Finally, Gartrell punched through the plaster on the other side of the wall, and he peered through the small hole he had made. Half the view was blocked by a table leg, but room beyond was sunlit. He surmised the apartment on the other side of the wall was a mirror image of Jolie’s, and that he had cut through to another small bedroom. He pulled more bricks away, sneezing from the dust, until the hole was big enough for him to squeeze through. Jaden was delighted by the sudden change in the back bedroom, and he pranced about on his toes, hooting a bit. Gartrell shushed him, but he still had to smile. There was something so innocent about the boy’s delight that Gartrell couldn’t help himself. Jolie picked Jaden up and hugged him tight as Gartrell unholstered his sidearm and pushed himself through the hole in the closet wall.

  The apartment was empty, as Jolie had said it would be. Gartrell walked through it and checked every room. He found evidence the occupants had left in a hurry-a carton of milk sat spoiling on the counter, magazines and books had been knocked from some shelves, and clothes lay scattered about on the floor in front of the closets. There was no luggage to speak of; the family had obviously taken that with them. He found a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses and unwrapped one of the chocolates and popped it into his mouth, then placed the bowl on top of the refrigerator so Jaden wouldn’t find it. The last thing he needed was a four-year-old autistic boy hopped up on sugar.

  “Dave? Jaden wants to come through,” Jolie called through the hole in the wall.

  “Put his shoes on first. And wait for me to close the curtains, some of them are still open.” Gartrell sidled up to a window and peeked out, keeping as close to the wall as possible. They were still out there, the legions of the dead…but something was different. They were no longer just milling about, shambling aimlessly to and fro. Somehow, some way, they had oriented themselves toward the north. As Gartrell watched, the ghoulish monstrosities lurched and stumbled up Second Avenue.

  In the far, far distance, he thought he heard the crackle of small arms fire.

  They’re on the hunt for food. They know there are people up north, so they’re moving out, looking to get the a la carte special.

  He watched the bizarre migration for a moment, and started counting stenches. He stopped at a hundred and three, which he had counted in less than forty seconds. There were hundreds right outside the apartment building, and thousands more walking up the avenue behind them.

  Unreal.

  Gartrell closed the curtains in the apartment as inconspicuously as he could. A scuffling sound attracted his attention, and he hurried back to the small bedroom just as Jaden walked through the hole in the wall. He looked at Gartrell and smiled, his previous aloofness forgotten. He kicked a brick across the wood floor and giggled.

  “Easy now,” Gartrell said. “Not too much noise, okay?”

  Jaden babbled something and walked on his toes toward the bedroom door, flapping his hands in the air. Gartrell reached out and restrained him gently. Jaden pushed against his hand, not because he didn’t want to be touched, but because the adventure of exploring a new and different apartment beckoned to him like a siren’s song. Gartrell looked back at the hole in the wall and watched as Jolie pushed herself through. She stood up straight and brushed dust from her shoulders.

  “Nice job,” she said to Gartrell.

  “Thanks. But I usually do my best work with explosives.”

  Jolie smiled and took Jaden’s hand. He pulled her along behind him as he surged out of the
small bedroom and into the Skinners’ apartment. Gartrell hung back for a moment, and pulled on his radio headset.

  “Falcon Four, this is Terminator Five, over.” He waited. “Falcon Four, Terminator Five with a SITREP for you, over.” SITREP was military shorthand for situation report, the circumstances where one unit or individual passed on tactical information. He didn’t know if what he had witnessed outside was a localized phenomenon, but he felt the lightfighters should know about it. He repeated the call twice more and was about to give up when Falcon came on the line.

  “Terminator, this is Falcon…what’ve you got? Over.”

  “Falcon, Terminator. Don’t know how it happened, but these things look kind of organized now. They’re all moving in the same direction at the same time, heading northerly at a slow but steady pace.” As he spoke, Gartrell moved to the skinny window in the bedroom and peeked around the curtain. Sure enough, the great stench migration continued, with all corpses ambulating north up Second Avenue. Gartrell noticed for the first time that there was a subway station right across the street, on the far corner. He remembered that another one was on his side of the avenue, just outside the Starbucks.

  “I thought you guys would want to know that, Falcon. Over.”

  “Roger, Terminator. We’re getting some aerial surveillance pictures from our UAVs. It’s not just your neighborhood, it’s everywhere in the city. The zeds are picking up and marching north. Over.”

  “It’s the zombie chow line, Falcon. Get ready for it. Over.”

  “Roger that, Terminator. By the way, news for you. First Chinook unit is setting down right now. We’re using the parking lots outside of Yankee Stadium as an assembly area. We already have HEMT-T tankers there,” Falcon reported. He pronounced HEMT-T as “hemmit”, and Gartrell knew they were huge, multi-wheeled trucks that could be configured for a variety of missions, in this case transporting aviation fuel. “Summit Six is lobbying to get a bird out to you directly. He wants you here, as a source of intel. Over.”

  “Falcon, this is Terminator. Tell Six I’ll even fetch his coffee and give him foot rubs if he can get us out of here-though do pass on that I’m hardly an expert at either. Over.”

  Falcon laughed over the radio. “Good one, Terminator. I’ll pass that on. If you-”

  Jolie shrieked suddenly from somewhere in the apartment, and Gartrell tuned out Falcon as he bolted out of the bedroom, his pistol ready in his right hand. He found Jolie kneeling on the floor, clutching Jaden to her as Jaden reached past her shoulder for the curtains. Gartrell saw he’d already been able to pull them half-open.

  “Is everything all right? What happened?” he asked, hurrying toward them.

  “Dah. Dee,” Jaden said gently, still reaching for the window.

  “He’s out there,” Jolie said. Her voice quaked in fear, and her shoulders shook. “Jaden opened the curtains before I could stop him…and when I looked out, I saw him outside.”

  “You saw who outside?”

  She looked up at him, and tears spilled from her big blue eyes. “Jack. My husband. Jaden’s father.”

  “Dah. Dee.”

  “Terminator, this is Falcon…you still there? Over.”

  “Falcon, Terminator. Stand by, something’s up on my end, over.” Gartrell stepped past them and peeked past the open curtain at the street below. The stenches were still walking north, but there was a congregation of about ten or fifteen standing right below. One of them-a man in a blood-spattered French blue shirt blazer and tan slacks-looked up at the apartment building with flat, dead eyes, his face pale and bloodless. A huge rent had been torn through his bearded cheek, and one of his hands was wrapped up in a bloodstained handkerchief. Flies flitted about the corpses below. Gartrell watched as they crawled in and out of the man-thing’s mouth and nostrils. The stench didn’t appear to care; it just stared up at the building.

  At the windows of the apartment next door. Jolie and Jaden’s apartment.

  “Dah. Dee,” Jaden said again, and this time there was an edge to his voice.

  “Take him out of here,” Gartrell said. He moved the pistol’s fire selector to SAFE and slid it into its holster, his eyes still on the group of zeds below. As he watched, the stench he figured to be Jolie’s husband-who in the pictures on the wall was hale and hearty, unlike this scraggly figure below-reached into one of its trouser pockets. It pulled something out and, for the first time, slowly looked down. It opened its hand and stared at what lay inside.

  It was a key ring.

  Oh, fuck me. Gartrell thought he had seen it all when zeds drove vehicles and fired guns, but if they could start unlocking doors with keys…that was even worse, somehow.

  “Dah-dee!” Jaden said, this time with much more force.

  “Take him back to your apartment!” Gartrell shook Jolie’s shoulder. “Jolie! Get him out of here! Now!”

  “All right!” she snapped back, her voice marred by a sudden sob. “We’re going!” She picked up Jaden and hurried back to the bedroom, sniffling. Jaden struggled against her, but she held him tight. Gartrell turned back to the window and slowly edged closer. Sure enough, Jolie’s dead husband was going through the keys on the ring, and he finally settled on one. Moving with a stupid slowness, the ghoul advanced toward the apartment building, holding the key out before it like it was some sort of weapon. Gartrell leaned forward a bit more to keep eyeballs on target, but he saw other zeds look up in his direction. He stepped back from the window and headed for the apartment door. He unlocked it and double-checked to ensure that he could open the door from the hall and that he wouldn’t get locked out. He ran toward the stairway across from Jolie’s apartment, and as he reached for the door, he realized he wasn’t wearing his helmet-and his NVGs were still mounted on the helmet’s bracket. He dithered about for an instant, wondering if he should go back for it, then decided he didn’t have the time. He pushed open the stairwell door and kept it open with one foot as he looked down over the banister.

  Below, the darkness was total, complete, unbroken. Gartrell heard the sound of his own breathing, loud in his ears, magnified by the tight confines of the stairwell. He put a hand on the butt of his pistol, and waited.

  From below, he heard something, a distant banging noise. He recalled the glass in the apartment building’s front door was reinforced with wire, and thought that one or two zombies would be unable to break through it. But what about five? Or ten?

  The banging stopped, but other sounds slowly rose up the stairwell. The crash of a door flung against a wall. A distant moaning. A far-off shuffling of feet…

  Fuck, they’re inside!

  As if to bring the point home, light flooded into the bottom of the stairwell as the door on the first floor was pushed open. Shadows filled the light, shadows in the shape of human beings.

  Gartrell had seen enough. He pulled back and closed the door to the stairs behind him and hurried for the apartment at the end of the hall.

  “Falcon, this is Terminator, over.”

  “Terminator, this is Falcon. What’s happening down there? Over.”

  “Falcon, Terminator.” Gartrell stepped inside the Skinners’ apartment and locked the door behind him. “I’m suffering from some major deja vu, this is the second time in less than twenty-four hours the building I’m in is overrun by stenches, and it’s not getting any easier with practice. I’ve got maybe a dozen stenches on their way up, over.” As he spoke, Gartrell sprinted for the hole he had cut in the closet wall and pushed through it. He went straight to the bureau and donned his helmet and body armor, then collected the remains of his gear. He put water bottles in his pockets and ensured the grenades were close at hand. He would need them soon.

  “Jolie! Load up one of those backpacks with as much food and water as you can carry, and get your revolver and that shotgun. We’re leaving!”

  She appeared at the door, still holding Jaden. “Where will we go?”

  Gartrell pointed at the hole in the wall. She started to say
something else, but he waved her to silence.

  “Ma’am, listen to me. The stenches are on their way up. You want to save that little boy of yours? Do as I tell, and do it damned quick.” Falcon was speaking into his ears, and he put a hand to one of the ear phones. “Falcon, Terminator. Say again, over.”

  “Terminator, this is Falcon. They’re hot-refueling one of the Chinooks. They’ll come for you as soon as they can. Twenty minutes, tops. Over.”

  “Not sure we can hold out for ten minutes, Falcon. I’ve got a little over a hundred rounds of ammunition total, not really enough to hold down the fort.” He slipped on his knapsack and pulled out the remaining drum of 12-gauge ammunition for the AA-12. He swapped out the almost-depleted one-down to three shells! — and slapped on the new one. “Falcon, how many soldiers are in the Second Avenue subway line? Over.”

  “Terminator, Falcon…uh, not really sure at the moment, why do you ask? Over.”

  “Because there’s a station right in front of the apartment building, and it might be our only chance. If we can stay ahead of the zeds and link up with the lightfighters, we might have a good chance of getting out of here. I’d love to catch a ride on that Chinook, but twenty minutes is a long wait under our circumstances, and if something goes wrong and the chopper has to abort, we’ll be trapped on the roof and royally fucked. So I really need to know if there are any troops in the area, how many, and if they’re headed our way. And I need to know that real, real quick. Over.”

  “Roger that, Terminator. Stand by.”

  Gartrell checked all of his weapons. All were operational. He strapped the MP5 to his right thigh and pulled the carry rig’s Velcro straps tight. He ensured elbow and kneepads were in place, and slipped on his gloves. He then dropped the baby sledge and two big chisels into his knapsack; he couldn’t imagine them coming in handy in the short term, but he wouldn’t want to wind up needing them and regret not having them. Everything in order, he left the bedroom and walked to the living room, where Jolie frantically stuffed one of the backpacks with virtually everything on the table. Gartrell grabbed her arm, and she swatted him away.