by David Moody
It was slightly brighter inside the kitchens, and the relative brightness made his eyes sting after days of dark. It was immediately obvious (and not at all surprising) that the whole area had long since been cleared out. The cupboards and storage areas – those he could see from where he was standing – had been stripped.
Carlton was about to leave the kitchen when something in the layer of rubbish under his feet caught his eye. He kicked a pile of plastic food trays out of the way and saw a hand, sticking up through the garbage as if asking for help. Working quickly, he uncovered the body of Lynn Price, the officer who’d been in charge of the kitchens. The poor bitch had a bread knife buried in her right kidney. A large pool of blood had spilled out over the kitchen floor. In places it was still tacky but most of it was dry. She’d been dead for some time.
Nerves threatened to get the better of Carlton. Did he continue to push further into the base, or should he turn around now and scuttle back to the relative safety of his dark tunnel hideout? Hiding was by far the easier option, but he knew it wouldn’t have done him any good in the long run. If he didn’t find food and water soon, he wouldn’t last. He was already beginning to dehydrate. Christ, what he would have given for a glass of ice-cold water right now. The fact he was standing in the middle of a kitchen only made him feel worse. He pressed on.
The kitchen was connected to the main mess hall. Carlton climbed over a stainless steel worktop then through the wide serving hatch before taking a few tentative steps into the deserted hall. It was in just as bad a state as the kitchen. It looked like there’d been a riot here. Furniture had been upturned and he could see the bodies of at least four more ex-colleagues. He was about to check the vending machines in the corner (obviously empty, but still enticingly illuminated) when the sound of another hail of bullets stopped him in his tracks. That was close. Too close. A moment of cautious silence followed, then the sound of heavy footsteps thundering past the mess hall entrance. From his position he saw four figures rush past the door and carry on down the corridor. He waited for a moment, then looked to see where they’d gone.
‘Carlton,’ a voice hissed at him from out of nowhere. His heart skipped a beat. He spotted a frightened face hiding in another doorway opposite. Who was it? It was difficult to see but he didn’t want to get any closer. Wait, was that Daniel Wright?
‘Dan? Dan, is that you?’
The figure on the other side of the corridor checked in both directions then crossed over into the mess hall. Wright pushed Carlton further back into the shadows.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ he asked, his voice just a whisper. ‘Haven’t seen you in weeks.’
‘Been hiding,’ Carlton replied, giving little away.
‘Sensible move. Best thing to do around here.’
‘What about you?’
‘I was with a few others. Got into a scrap and I took the chance to duck out and get away.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘We’re all waiting to die, didn’t you know? Fucking place is falling apart. People are falling apart. Half those left down here are already dead, and most of them killed themselves.’
Carlton was silent. Nothing Wright said came as a surprise. ‘So what are you doing now?’
‘No bloody idea,’ Wright admitted. ‘Way I see it, there’s not a lot any of us can do.’
The conversation was interrupted by the sounds of another fight breaking out deeper in the base. Wright peered out into the corridor again, then quickly pulled his head back inside.
‘Anything?’
‘Nothing. It’s just a matter of time, though. Won’t be long before this whole fucking place goes up in smoke.’
More noise. Getting closer now. Wright started to shuffle uncomfortably. ‘Where you been hiding then, mate?’ he asked. Carlton didn’t immediately answer. He couldn’t tell him. ‘Come on, man,’ Wright begged as the noise echoing along the corridor continued to increase in volume. ‘Let me come with you. I won’t do anything to get you found, I swear. I just want somewhere safe where I can—’
Soldiers appeared at the end of the corridor. More gunshots. A figure collapsed in a hail of bullets. More troops trampled the fallen body as they ran for shelter.
Carlton wanted to run back to the service tunnel, but he knew Wright would follow and he couldn’t afford to let him. He had to lose him fast.
‘Come on, mate,’ Wright begged. ‘Please…’
In a sudden flash of movement, Wright drew a knife and held it to Carlton’s neck. All Carlton could think about was the suit. Cut me, but don’t cut the bloody suit.
‘I can’t…’ Carlton whimpered.
‘Show me where you’re hiding or I’ll fucking kill you,’ Wright said, his face against the other man’s ear.
‘I can’t,’ he said again, and before Wright realised what he was doing, Carlton shoved his pistol up into his gut and fired. Wright collapsed and Carlton stepped over him, wiping dribbles of blood from his precious suit and checking for tears.
He was about to go out into the corridor when another group of soldiers ran past the mess hall doorway, this time heading in the opposite direction to the first, moving deeper into the base again. More followed, then even more. One of the soldiers straggling at the back of the pack tried to grab hold of Carlton and drag him along with him but Carlton squirmed free. ‘Get out of here,’ the soldier in the corridor screamed at him. ‘Get out of here now. They’re opening the bloody doors!’
Not caring who saw him now, Carlton ran back through the mess hall, climbing back through the serving hatch and sprinting across the kitchen. He raced back to his hideout as quickly as his tired, under-exercised legs would carry him. He threw himself into the service tunnel, then scrabbled around in the darkness for his breathing apparatus. Hands trembling with nerves, he put on his kit then wedged himself into a gap between two large ducts. He melted back into the darkness and waited.
#
Five soldiers had fought their way into the decontamination chambers at the entrance to the bunker. Their priorities skewed after weeks of frightened isolation, two of them worked to get the sealed doors open while another three held off other troops who fought to prevent the integrity of the base being compromised. Perhaps the risk of infection had finally passed? The men now struggling to open the doors and get outside genuinely believed this was their last chance.
Whenever the soldiers covering those working on the door saw even the slightest glimpse of movement in the corridor leading to the decontamination chambers, they let fly a hail of bullets. Those trying to stop them didn’t stand a chance, such was the position of the doorway being defended. Explosives and grenades were useless too. To use munitions of any strength at this close range would almost certainly cause irreparable damage to the chambers and compromise the base. A few desperate fighters continued to try and prevent the breach at all costs; mostly those who’d been unfortunate enough to have already seen the hell outside, those who’d already fought hand to hand with vast numbers of the unstoppable dead. They’d rather die now than face them again.
It seemed inevitable that the doors would eventually be opened again. It was just a matter of time.
#
Carlton lay on his back in the tunnel, shaking with fear. The world sounded different from behind the mask; muffled, distant and indistinct. It made him feel even more disconnected, even more scared.
He could hear people dying, their screams echoing through this maze of subterranean corridors and passageways. The noises seemed to surround Carlton, coming at him from every angle.
Then it all stopped.
The chaos was replaced by a sudden silence so unexpected and terrifying that it made Carlton lose control of his bladder. He lay on his back in a pool of his own piss and lifted a trembling hand up to his mask, ready to tear it off. I should just do it, just get it over with…
But he couldn’t.
Sobbing with fear, he lay still and waited.
#
<
br /> The silence had continued for almost two days. In his cramped confinement, Carlton listened intently to the stillness. He was weak with hunger and slept fitfully.
After endless hours of nothing, he finally heard something. Had he imagined it? He held his breath and listened carefully, the rapid thump of his own frightened heartbeat pounding in his ears and threatening to drown out every other sound. What was happening? He’d begun to presume that the all-consuming silence of the last forty or so hours had been a good thing. Surely if the base had been invaded by swarms of decaying bodies he would have seen or heard something by now?
There it was again – the bang and clatter of metal on metal. He had to do something now, he couldn’t wait here any longer. Moving slowly, he slid back down the service corridor to the junction with the second, slightly wider passageway. Once there he crouched down on aching knees and listened again, keeping well out of sight. More noise. This time even further away, still unclear and indistinct, random, almost.
Carlton moved forward, then stopped when he reached the next corridor. He could see the kitchen door. The lights were lower than before, only the dull yellow back-up lighting still working. He retraced the steps he’d taken a few days earlier, tiptoeing through the wreckage, doing all he could not to make any unnecessary noise. He stepped over the officer’s corpse he’d discovered last time he was here, then slid through the serving hatch and out into the mess hall.
More distant sounds. He primed his pistol, cringing at the uncomfortably loud noise it made, then walked to the end of the hall. He stopped when a figure appeared from a doorway over to his far left. Christ, who was that? The figure wore a soldier’s uniform, but it moved painfully slowly, obviously badly injured.
Carlton held his breath, trying not to move for fear of giving away his position. Something was very wrong here. The soldier’s head hung heavily over to one side and he seemed to be dragging his feet rather than taking steps. He was now no more than a couple of feet away. He staggered into the dull glow of an emergency light directly overhead, and Carlton recoiled at his nightmarish appearance. What the hell had happened to him? It was as if the life had been drained out of him: his skin was white, almost blanched, and thick, dried blood had dribbled from his mouth, down his chin and onto his uniform. His eyes were unfocused, staring ahead but not actually appearing to look at anything. To all intents and purposes this poor bastard looked dead. Carlton disappeared back into the shadows of the mess hall, and the soldier shuffled past him oblivious.
It had to be the infection. That was the only logical explanation. The integrity of the bunker had been compromised and the germ or whatever it was that had done all the damage outside had been let in. His mind began to work overtime. If everyone else is infected, he thought, then I have to get out of here. Christ, he’d seen for himself what the dead hordes were capable of when they’d forced the military back and entered the hangar almost seventy days ago. And now he found himself trapped on the wrong side of the bunker doors with, potentially, anything up to a hundred of these bloody things. He had to get out of here. He had to get out right now. He didn’t know where he was going or how he was going to get there, but he had to try and make a run for it. He was going to die soon, that much was inevitable, but he wasn’t about to let himself be torn apart at the dead hands of former friends and colleagues. As weak and tired and frightened as he was, he wasn’t prepared to end his days like that. One last push…
Carlton stepped out into the corridor, the dead soldier still tripping away to his right.
To Carlton’s left the passageway was clear. He limped further down the corridor, passing the door from which the body had emerged and eventually reaching a T-junction. Left or right? All the corridors in this damn place looked as grey and disappointingly featureless as the next. Carlton was disorientated and he couldn’t clearly remember the way to the control room, but he knew if he could reach the control room he was sure he’d then be able to find the communications room. Once he’d made it there he’d be able to work his way back through the maze of tunnels to the decontamination chambers, and that had to be the area he aimed for. If he could reach one of the chambers then, providing there wasn’t still a flood of rotting bodies trying to force their way inside, he’d have a chance, albeit a very slight one, of getting out of the base alive. What happened after that, though, was anyone’s guess.
He turned left. Damn, wrong way. Just the door to a ransacked equipment store and a dead end. He retraced his steps, moving with a little more freedom now. All he had to do was… shit, another soldier up ahead, and he had no option but to pass them. He watched the shabby figure as it tripped towards him and he readied himself to defend against attack. He held up his pistol and aimed it into the other man’s face. ‘Stop,’ he ordered. ‘Stop there or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’
But the dead soldier continued its lethargic advance, and all Carlton could do was shoot. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and winced as the deafening sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the underground complex, taking forever to fade away. When he dared look again he saw that the soldier’s corpse had crumbled to the ground in front of him, the top of its head missing. Crimson red dripped from the grey corridor walls. Carlton was so preoccupied with the bloody mess that he failed to notice another two figures approaching until they’d almost reached the corpse on the floor. Without stopping to consider his actions, he fired off two more shots at close range.
At the end of this corridor was the control room. More through luck than judgement, he’d found it.
Carlton weaved around empty desks and redundant computer equipment. Another body staggered towards him but, rather than waste precious time fighting, this time he simply stepped out of its way and the vacuous thing blundered past. It didn’t even appear to have seen him.
Out of the control room now. Another left turn, straight down the corridor to the very end and then right. Jesus Christ, yet another one of them. He shot this one in the face – the passageway was too narrow to take any chances. He stepped over the corpse and pushed through the door into the communications room. And then he stopped. But it wasn’t bodies stopping him this time, it was self-doubt. Another couple of hundred metres or so of corridor and he’d be outside the decontamination chambers. Did he really want to do this? Could he do it? More to the point, was there any alternative? Carlton realised his choices now were appallingly grim: stay underground with around a hundred undead soldiers for company, or try and get up to the surface and face the possibility of having to deal with many, many more bodies up top. The thought of getting out of the bunker was the deciding factor. Okay, so it might not be any better (it would probably be much worse) aboveground, but at least he’d be out in the open, if only for a few minutes. Imagine not seeing the sky again, he thought to himself. Imagine dying in this place and never seeing the sun. His decision was made.
Carlton paused for a second longer to catch his breath, then left the communications room through another exit and ran headlong into a crowd of seven more bodies, all of them struggling to get down a corridor which was only wide enough for two. Instinctively he began to kick and punch at them, either battering them to the ground or dragging them out of the way. They offered next to no resistance as he angrily beat a clear path through.
The corridor ahead was clear now, and he could see through to the doors into the decontamination chambers. Just a few metres further… but there were yet more bodies to get past first. In the doorway leading into the main chamber lay a pile of fallen corpses, blood-soaked and riddled with fresh bullet holes. Bloody hell, the creature at the very bottom of the gory heap was still moving! In the chamber itself more corpses staggered around aimlessly. Doing his best to ignore their disarmingly insistent, clumsy movements, Carlton focused on the open decontamination chamber doors, preparing himself for the expected onslaught of endless thousands of savage corpses, all baying angrily for his flesh.
But where he had expected to see such
frantic activity, he instead saw nothing. No movement at all. Complete stillness. Unexpected calm.
In disbelief, convinced his tired eyes must be deceiving him, Carlton pushed away the last of the dumb bodies still moving around the chamber, and walked up to the final door which separated the interior of the bunker from the diseased world outside. He could see that the huge hangar doors were still open and much of the vast cavern was filled with harsh but beautiful sunlight. He looked out at an utterly unbelievable scene, then took a single, very hesitant, step out into the hangar.
The cavernous place was virtually unrecognisable, the air filled with the angry noise of millions of swarming flies and other insects. He carefully put his foot down on the ground, his boot sinking into a putrefied sea of human remains several inches deep. Bloody hell, the whole of the chamber was coated with a layer of stinking, rotten flesh. As he looked deeper into the sickening quagmire he was able to make out features – bones, the remains of clothing, abandoned weapons and armour. And some of it was moving! All around the apparently endless grey-green-red mire he could see occasional twitches of movement.
Overcome by the horror of what surrounded him, and almost forgetting the fact that he was now outside the inner sanctum of the bunker, Carlton moved slowly forward through the once-human sludge. He forced himself to look up rather than down as he dragged his tired feet along. It was easier to scrape the soles of his boots rather than take proper steps and risk losing his footing and sliding deeper into the gore.
Before long he had reached the bottom of the ramp which would lead him back up into the rest of the world. He didn’t hesitate to start climbing. No matter what he found up there, it couldn’t be any worse than the sickening pit of death he was already standing in, could it?
It was difficult to make any progress up the flesh-covered incline. His boots struggled for grip in the slime and filth. Eventually he dropped down onto his hands and knees and began to crawl, still angling his head upwards so that he didn’t have to look at what he was crawling through. He kept moving steadily, trying to think about absolutely anything that might distract him from this slurry of rotting human remains. Whilst generally slippery and creamy and almost liquefied in places, the gruesome mixture was full of brittle bones and pieces of abandoned military equipment. Don’t rip the suit, he desperately told himself, for Christ’s sake, don’t rip the suit.