The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series)

by Mathis Kurtz, Robert

  “Shit,” he said. But he’d whispered it. Because he had realized that, he could hear something new. A noise had arisen so slowly and so gradually that it had crept up on him, like a very nasty surprise.

  Even through the windows and walls of the building, he could hear the tramping of feet from outside. As if thousands of people were, as Stallings had said, marching down the streets. But instead of looking out the nearest window, Ron went into one of the smaller cubicles near the break room. He knew that Stacy Drake usually had her computer linked to the Internet, chatting with her Facebook friends whenever she figured no supervisor was hovering around. He would check her computer screen and see what the news feeds were saying. She had been there that morning. Ron had specifically noticed her sitting at her desk when he had gone to his office.

  As he had hoped, her computer indeed was logged onto the Internet. She had left it on, set at her Facebook page. Ron hadn’t meant to pry, but the last message from her mother was just…there. He couldn’t avoid it.

  Stacy. Come home. Someone has killed your father.

  Ron had peered down at his feet. His left foot kept hitting something. It was Stacy’s pocketbook. She had obviously just grabbed her car keys and fled. Sitting there, looking down at that pocketbook, containing everything that a woman of Drake’s station needed to move around—her ID, her charge cards, her license, her cash—he felt his stomach drop.

  He had been an idiot. A total fool. He had allowed Linden to manipulate him. He had allowed the governor to convince him that he was holding the fucking line. The government had said they were going to handle this.

  They were all a bunch of goddamned liars and he had fallen for it.

  He went back to the screen and hit the bookmarks, hoping Stacy-the-office-clerk had at least one or two news site set up. CNN was on her favorites and he clicked the tab.

  Ron stared at the screen. It was a still shot at Times Square. Dozens…no it was hundreds; hundreds of people were lying in pools of blood and entrails as an army of the dead were devouring them. Men, women and children were killing and eating men, women and children. Beneath the photo were the words: THE DEAD KILL

  At that instant, the Internet crashed. The lights in the office flickered twice, three times, and then went dark.

  Standing, Cutter had plucked his cell phone from his pocket. It was also dead. “Goddamn.” He just muttered it to himself and wandered out of his office into the hallway.

  As soon as he walked out, he saw Lacy Morgan coming toward him. She was the best-looking woman in the building, and it was always assumed that Linden was nailing her. Of course, no one knew for sure, but the signs seemed to point that way. Immediately, Cutter could tell that she was dazed.

  “Lacy? Are you okay?” he asked. He could see no one else, and it was definite by this time that, they had all fled. His fellow employees had left him alone with the main squeeze of his boss. Not even the laborers who loaded the trucks were making their usual noise from the warehouse.

  “It’s Mr. Linden,” she said. “Vickie Penland told me that Mr. Linden was acting strange this morning. Out of sorts. I told her that I’d go speak to him. Mr. Linden always listens to me when he’s cranky, you know.” By this time, Lacy had come much closer, splitting the distance between them. She was wearing a short ocean-blue dress, showing off her great legs and a good bit of ample cleavage. Cutter could also see that her right hand was covering a wound on her left upper arm.

  “Lacy?” Cutter stopped, seeing the blood seeping between her fingers.

  Before he could say another word or move at all, Mr. Linden suddenly surged around the corner of the hallway, looming behind Lacy Morgan like the wall of animated flesh he had become. His own shirt was stained with blood. You could see that he had been injured at some point and had put a crude bandage over the wound, and now that crude bandage of gauze and tape had peeled away, blood soaking through his neatly starched white shirt. He’d come into work all the same, trying to pretend he would be just fine as soon as he dabbed on a little antibiotic.

  With hardly a sound, Linden put his huge, bluish paws on his confused mistress. Before either, she or Cutter could say or do anything at all; dead Linden leaned forward and took a hideously huge bite out of Lacy’s long and flawless neck. Finally, realizing what pain truly was, she screamed. Cutter screamed, too, knowing now that everyone else had either run, or were perhaps bleeding and lying quite dead in some corner of the place, and perhaps about to get back up.

  At that moment, he knew that he was on his own.

  **

  The first thing he did was flee that scene of horror. There was nothing that could be done for Lacy and so he had turned on his heel and made for the stairwell. Already, he could hear sounds of chaos coming from the floor below him. The front doors had obviously been left unlocked as the scarlet-haired Ms. Penland had vacated the premises when the getting out had been good. She had obviously been in too much of a hurry to bother to lock the door behind her, or else she had been unable to do so. Cutter figured the latter. Maybe she had left with others when the entire lot of them ran like people who had the good sense to get the hell out of Dodge.

  The power was gone, so he knew that it would be pointless to try the elevators. Instead, he carefully opened the door to the stairwell and peeked in. Dim light filtered in from small square windows in the concrete well of the place, and he could see that nothing moved in there. However, he could hear shuffling sounds from below. Those things had already opened the door on the first floor and were checking out the stairwell. He would have to move fast, so he quickly ducked through the door and began moving up the stairs as fast as he could without actually running. Cutter had a bad knee—two rounds of surgery to fix floating cartilage and a torn meniscus. He had to be careful on that right knee, since it had not fully recovered from that last bit of arthroscopic work. I’ll have to miss my next session with the physical therapist, he mused, almost laughing.

  From downstairs, the sounds of moving feet were becoming louder. He could hear the muffled moans of those dead throats, also. He had heard them before, out on the streets when the problem had first appeared. Generally, they made no sounds at all, but when they got agitated, they would begin a kind of moan that could generate into a low snarl when they got down to the business of killing. What Cutter was hearing now from down in the shadowed stairwell were the initial moans, as they must have figured they had something to chase. It was his own hurried steps that had tipped them off, he knew. Well, now there was nothing to do, except climb and find a way out before he was completely trapped.

  Breathing hard, and feeling the heat that was creeping into the building, he reached the next floor and once more, the prospect faced him of opening a door that would lead into a possibly bad situation. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of dead lungs and tromping feet. Those things normally did not move very fast, but they could almost trot when they knew there was someone to kill and eat within reach. Thinking that he could even see movement coming up through the darkness, he took his chances and pushed the door open.

  Nothing but silence greeted him... Moving into the hallway, he turned and looked to see if he could lock the door or bar it. There was a lock, but he had no key for it and didn’t know where he could find one. All he could do was keep moving. At the back of the floor was a kind of covered walkway that led over to the warehouse, and there was also a closed scaffold that led down to the street. It was caged in and there was a gate at the bottom that latched from the inside. Since you could only open it from inside the walkway, they never locked it. And…theoretically…only employees would be using that staircase. It really was his only option out of the building now, so he pushed on.

  Walking on, Cutter loosened his tie and opened his shirt. The sun was up, showing above the level of the building around Briggs Stationers. It was getting hot. Taking a moment, he looked down at the streets to see that the marching dead packed them. Among them, he saw the figures moving quicker than t
he dead do, and noticed that most of those people were surrounded in quick order and taken down. Muffled screams and high-pitched yelling that was not mercifully muffled filtered up the three floors to his ears. He could not block out those sounds of pain, and he averted his eyes so that he didn’t witness the worst of the atrocities being committed below. Already, the streets were literally running red with blood.

  Instinctively, he stayed away from the edge of the roof. Not because he feared falling, but because he did not want any of the masses of dead that were flowing through the streets to notice him and follow his movement or give chase. He would have to stay as invisible as possible if he were going to escape. At the door to the caged fire escape, he risked a look below and his heart sank.

  The shamblers seemed to pack the street from side to side. Bodies of every shape and size were moving as a single-minded mass, reaching out for anything that was different from them, grasping for anyone who was alive and thinking. God help him, but Cutter actually found himself hoping that some of the people fleeing before that monstrous parade would stumble and allow him to pass unnoticed by the throngs of undead. The pleas for mercy and the curses that degenerated into madness let him know that his hopes had come true.

  Once inside the caged walkway, he was committed. He turned to see if he could block the gate behind him, but there was no latch there. If any of the things from the stairwell stumbled out onto the roof, they would be after him in a heartbeat and the door to the fire escape would open. If that happened, he would have not retreat at all, except to make straight down for street level, to the streets where the dead were pushing in ever-increasing number. He paused to catch his breath and the stench from below almost gagged him. Rising up on the hot summer wind was the stench of death, blood, shit and urine. Cutter put his tie to his nose, breathing in the fabric softener in which he had washed the cloth the day before. It cut the stench a little and allowed him to move without stopping to vomit.

  He was happy for the crepe soles he was wearing. They made hardly a sound on the metal grate of the fire escape. Moving carefully and deliberately, he was taking care not to put his weight down so heavily that he brought attention to himself. As long, as didn’t make too much noise, the figures below would keep their eyes straight ahead and not pay him any mind at all.

  In a moment, he was at the bottom of the stairs. He glanced back up toward the roof, and as he had feared, the shamblers had found the door to the upper end of the fire escape and were heading in a long line toward it. Now Cutter knew that if they became agitated and began to moan or snarl at him, then the ones on the street would focus on the object of their desire. They would zero in on him and he would not make it. He would die, right there in that stupid metal cage.

  Taking a deep breath, Cutter pushed the chain link door open and carefully closed the door behind him, making sure that metal did not meet metal with enough force to make a sound. Then he turned around so that he could make his way down the alley and head for any place that might provide refuge. His car was out of the question. The parking lot where he had left it was in the path of the hordes of undead and even if he got to the car, several tons of rotting flesh would soon have surrounded and weighed it down. He would never get out of the parking lot, much less the neighborhood. Instead, he would make his way toward a condominium project two blocks away. It had only recently opened and only they had only sold about a third of the units—the economy in the months before the dead had begun to rise was already shot. Almost no one had been able to afford to buy one of the homes. It was ten floors of mainly empty condos, all waiting for buyers who had never arrived.

  It would give him a place to retreat, if he could get there without them seeing him. Once there, he hoped that he could find someone to help him. Barring that, if he could just lay his hands on a gun, anything that he could use to shoot his way out of a bad situation. Cutter had been a good shot when was a younger man. His dad taught him how to shoot and he was an adequate marksman. All he needed was a weapon.

  Turning the corner, away from the fire escape, he moved as silently as possible down the alleyway. One of the warehouse workers had left a bay door open. They had obviously taken one of the big trucks out and had not bothered to close the place behind them. Who could blame them? Walking past the great dark square of shadow that led into what would normally have been the brightly illuminated warehouse; he looked quickly to his right to see if anyone was still there. Maybe there was still a worker inside who would help him.

  Instead, the figure that emerged from the shadow was not, in any way, going to help him. The fellow had once been a warehouse worker. Cutter recognized what was left of the man’s face. He found himself trying to recall the gent’s name. He had worked with a cherry picker hauling down big items like filing cabinets and modular desks from high racks. Ron often found himself speaking to the guy, asking if certain items were in stock. The guy seemed to know where to find things even if their own programs said they were sold out. True to that same old stubbornness and tenacity, the creature noticed Cutter doing his best not to be noticed, and it gave chase.

  Shit, Ron thought. Despite everything, knowing that he shouldn’t do anything to draw attention to himself, he began to race away as quickly as he could without breaking into a full run. Nevertheless, he was trotting; causing his gait to echo off the walls of the alley, and the thing that had seen him began to moan. The moans also echoed from wall to wall. Cutter risked a look back, and the dead that had been stumbling along the caged catwalk, turned their dead faces toward him and realized that he was not like them, that he was among the living, and that he was merely there for them to consume. Their moans rose in volume and pitch until they were snarling, almost yelling. The footfalls on the metal grate began to hammer, adding to the growing noise that was filling the alleyway.

  Then Cutter put his eyes forward and suddenly he found that he really was running. He was running faster than he should have been. He was racing off far more quickly than a man with a bum knee should ever have thought about moving.

  The alleyway was suddenly an echo chamber where the angry noise of the dead was magnified. He risked a look back, and was horrified to see that the enormous, numberless mob that he had seen marching down the street had turned into the alley, and was moving faster than he’d thought.

  Each of them was after a single thing, Ron Cutter.

  Cursing Linden, his employer, Ms. Penland who had opened the door for him, and cursing the President for telling him to go shopping, and mostly hating himself for falling for the damned lies, Ron threw himself down the alley. He knew that if he did not make it to the other side of that alley before the throngs detected him, then he was as good as dead. So once more, he pushed himself a little bit harder than he should have, feeling the pain in that right knee, knowing exactly where the surgeons had cut and stitched, he cursed them, too.

  Quickly he was out of the alley and out on the street. He looked left, and saw a hundred dead faces snarling at him, trying to head him off. Cutter looked right, and realized that the way toward the condo units was mainly deserted. The dead had not filled that street yet, and he might still have a chance. Stifling a scream, he turned in that direction and made himself stop running. He kept saying to himself, trot, do not run, he could jog, skip or anything else, but just don’t run. Save yourself, he commanded. Save it for when you’re going to need it.

  Once again, he was aware of the stench of the dead. It was not so much from rot, but of something else. It was the mixture of excrement, urine and blood. Someone had said that after they rose, they didn’t rot so fast, and that they might all last for years, before time and nature broke them apart. “They’re like people with leprosy,” a talking head had informed everyone on the television. “It’s as if they’re suffering from a combination of leprosy and rabies,” the now-famous epidemiologist had told everyone. “As such, these…these people might last for ten years. Or more.” He had paused before adding those last two words. Now that R
on thought about it, after that, the guy had ceased to appear on the TV news shows. He had probably pissed off the people who were trying to keep the shops open, gas stations pumping, and power stations generating. He had probably threatened someone’s bottom line.

  Cutter almost broke into laughter, but he saw that the condo tower was before him, less than a block away. All he had to do was go in, and then close the door behind him.

  On the street in front of him, there was another group of the dead. They had been crouched on the pavement, clawing at what was obviously a mass of flesh that had been two or three people shortly before. As Cutter came trotting toward them, though, they stopped what they were doing and looked his way. When they did, the things that they had been eating also began to stir. Sitting up and looking his way was one of the things that still had enough body left to get up. The other just began to twitch in place. They had Cutter dead to rights. A score of dead faces snarled at him, mouths opened, dropping gobs of red stuff that had been their food a few seconds before. Now they were interested in fresher meat, meaning it was Ron Cutter’s turn.

  “Fuck you,” Cutter muttered. He would be in the building before they could get to him, and once there, he was sure he could find doors that could be locked and barricaded. Once there, he could hide and find enough time to plan a real escape. He even paused briefly, hands on his knees, and caught his breath. The sun burned down on his bare head. He breathed in, trying to ignore the hovering stench from the dead all around him. “Fuck the lot of you,” he repeated, and marched up to the big glass door and tugged on it.

  “Oh, fuck me,” he whispered. It was locked.