Kahn came to his feet as a second explosion rocked the Alamodome. The first, initiated by the detonator and opening the outside walls, began a five-minute fuse for the second series of charges. This set was intended to damage the outer structural columns of the building enough so that the third round would bring the entire amphitheater down.
He stumbled, barely staying on his feet as he fell forward to the hatch. The Burned Woman was gripping the edge of the portal with her fused fingers. As Kahn fell, he caught a glance at Deb and Jesse still struggling to dispatch the neck-shot corpse. Deb’s hatchet stuck comically from the creature’s collarbone as it reached with one, undamaged arm. The man-made earthquake rocking the coliseum brought them dangerously close to the edge. As Kahn cried out, first Deb and then Jesse disappeared over the edge. The biter, with no regard for anything but a fleshy meal, followed.
Kahn got up and ran erratically to the cupola edge where they disappeared, sliding on his knees to see what happened to his friends. The dead creature with the protruding hatchet was just coming to the end of the slide and Kahn watched as it vanished into the dust-filled air below the dome. He cried out in horror, screaming over the growing roar of toppling cement before hearing his name through the dust.
“Hal! Hal, we’re safe!” a woman’s voice called.
“Deb? Jesse?” he looked through the billowing dust and saw a set of hands waving back and forth from a flat surface. Two faces became visible after a gust blew the gray dust past and Kahn saw the pair of fighters standing next to a rail below.
“Yes, we’re okay! We landed on one of the skybox balconies. Can you make it inside?”
“Yes, I think so. The hatch is still open and I have the Burned Woman with me,” he called out, glancing back at the figure in the bloodstained robe. “We can come down to the stadium level to find you.”
“Okay, we’ll find you inside! Hurry!” Deb and Jesse ran under the shield of the metal roof and into the skybox.
Kahn hurriedly scrambled to his feet and staggered back to the hatch. As he did, the crack in the roof split and transformed into an unsteady crevasse. Chunks of the roof broke away and fell into the darkness below. Kahn once again grabbed the damaged woman, helping her onto the short ladder and then impatiently throwing himself over the side.
The roof was collapsing, and the third charge’s fuse was burning toward detonation.
Chapter 41
- Fall
Fall
The spin of the dark stairwell interior and the constant flow under his feet was making Kahn sick to his stomach. He paused on the third landing below the roof and vomited in the corner. When he looked up, the Burned Woman was watching him again.
You need to hurry or I’m leaving you behind, he thought but did not say. He found himself unable to think cruelly toward this woman anymore. After slapping her in the face in the makeshift detention center and her volunteering to be traded for Daisy, Kahn found himself feeling slightly reverent toward the Burned Woman. He could almost understand how Jesse and the reverend had acted toward her. Protective, and careful. Not because her body was delicate, but because her presence was strong.
“Come on,” he said, wiping vomit from his mouth. “We need to get down to the stadium.”
He hefted the carbine over his shoulder, having recovered it from the bottom of the ladder along with the hatchet he now held as they descended into the building. Cruel, belch-like rumbles kept coming from the bottom of the stairs, blowing dust past them each time. He knew they had passed an entrance to the upper level of the stadium at some point on the ascent, he just couldn’t remember how many levels down it was. The floor rumbled again, shaking the column of stairs violently. They both had to stop and grip the railing to keep from falling over. The wall just above them split, dropping a large jagged block of concrete from the ceiling onto the unsteady stairs. Not having any other choice, Kahn continued down despite the quake. He reached back, holding the hand of the missus as they both stumbled to the next landing.
“This is it!” he yelled over the noise of the collapsing structure. There was a door here labeled for the stadium’s upper seating area, section 300 rows 1 - 28. Kahn shoved the door and it barely budged against the frame. Diagonal cracks were forming from each top corner and Kahn struggled against the warped edges. He took a few steps back and shoved with all his strength, groaning as the door opened with a high-pitched scrape against the floor. He squeezed through the opening and pulled the Burned Woman behind him.
They were in a dark, wide hallway. A trickle of light came from the barely-open door they had just left. As they felt their way forward, a deafening crash sounded and a billowing cloud of gray dust blew in from the starwell. Kahn pulled the Burned Woman along, holding a bundle of her loose clothing in one hand and feeling the wall with the other. The building continued to rumble and shake as they made their way diagonally away from the collapsed stairs.
After fifty feet or so of movement by touch, Kahn could see yellow light shining from a double door ahead. He moved quickly to the light source and pushed the doors open into the center of the tallest tier of the stadium. They walked forward into granules of concrete rippling through bright shafts of sunlight. Large pieces of the roof above had fallen to the lowest level of seating. The apocalypse had left the exposition arena configured for a concert, and now the stage served mostly crushed chairs, twisted metal, and shattered blocks of the concrete ceiling.
Kahn and the missus leaned on the railing, looking at the destruction and trying to spot the private skybox seats through the opaque air.
“Hello!” Kahn called, listening to his voice fall flat through the thick dust. The Burned Woman began to cough and he escorted her around the curve of the front row of seats to the eastern side of the large stadium. He called out again and looked up toward where he assumed the balcony would enter the building. There were several elevated mezzanines with nicer-than-standard stadium seating that were backed by long rows of tall, surprisingly unbroken windows. There was no way up.
As soon as Kahn found the area he suspected led to his friend’s lifesaving terrace, Jesse and Deb burst through a glass door onto the middle platform. They ran to the edge and Kahn called their names.
“Hal, how do we get down?” Deb asked, yelling over a large roof panel crashing to the ground.
“There is no way down from here!” he replied, looking around. “There’s another double door here. Try to find some stairs.”
“There was an elevator in the box,” Jesse said, cringing at another piece of debris landing nearby. “There’s got to be steps nearby.”
“Go find them, we’re going through this door and down to the parking lot. When we get there we’ll--”
His speech was interrupted by a series of explosions on the western side of the coliseum, the third and final set of destructive charges. The ones designed to destabilize the building and bring it crashing to earth.
Chapter 42
- Aftershock
Aftershock
The final quake brought all four to their knees, Jesse and Deb gripping each other tightly as Kahn and the Burned Woman tried not to fall from the top level to the concert floor. The aftershocks never stopped, and they held fiercely to the rails as the western walls began to fall. Kahn saw the three-hundred-foot structure begin to crumble. The far walls dissolved like an avalanche, crushing the multi-tiered seating and throwing debris across the entire length of the hall.
When the immediate crash settled, Kahn pulled himself to his feet and looked for Jesse and Deb above his position. He couldn’t see or hear anything over the exploding building, now brightly illuminated as more of the outside walls crumbled. He finally spotted them huddled in a ball through a break in the dust and tried calling their names in vain. He looked around and realized he lost his carbine and his hatchet in their retreat.
Then, the rumble of the building shifted as he felt the third tier columns below his position began to falter. He held on tightly and watche
d the skyboxes begin to collapse to the ground. First, the farthest one began to lean forward, tearing plumbing and structural rebar from the eastern wall. They watched appliances, televisions, and fancy chairs fly from the shattering windows as the entire box slid forward. It landed on the top tier and continued sliding, leaving a swath of destruction. Kahn heard a piercing voice over it all.
“Run!”
It was Deb, standing on the top of their box screaming dismally. Jesse grabbed her and Kahn watched as they disappeared into the skybox, seeking out the stairs that would bring them outside the falling amphitheater.
Kahn’s paralysis broke. Once again he pulled his frail companion to her feet. They half-ran, half-stumbled down a narrow corridor into the second set of double-doors and into another wide hallway. Kahn turned them to the right and continued to run. The hall sloped down and they both felt as if they were descending into the belly of a beast as the walls and ceiling continued to shake. They came to the end of a section where another set of double-doors led to the lower seating area. The hall had partially collapsed and chunks of the fallen building blocked the majority of their route.
“Come on,” Kahn said, pulling the Burned Woman over a waist-high block. He helped her to the other side where they briefly rested. In a surprise reprieve from the noise of the collapse, Kahn very clearly heard a noise that drove icy chills up his spine.
Growling from a large group of the undead.
Deb pulled Jesse along into the damaged luxury box. A piece of debris had struck him on the balcony, and blood dripped from his stringy hair onto his face and the ground. She struggled to get him to his feet as he stumbled through the quaking building and the head injury. Dropping him on a leather sofa, Deb frantically began to search for an escape.
The elevator on the right hand side of the room was useless, of course, but Deb started at the sliding metal doors. She attempted to pry them open like in the movies and couldn’t even get her fingers in a position to grip the brushed aluminum surface. Giving up quickly, she first thought to use the hatchet on Jesse’s belt to pry the door. Two steps later she saw a better option, a door marked with a small inoperable emergency exit light.
Grabbing Jesse under the armpits, she ran for the door. The room shifted and groaned loudly, suddenly pitching toward the concert floor. The seemingly unbreakable windows began to shatter as the skybox warped. Glass flew as the bent frames of the windows burst outward just as Deb opened the exit door and threw her partner inside.
Over the deafening disintegration in progress, she slapped Jesse as he leaned against the wall. “I need you here!” she yelled, barely making a squeak against the crashes all around them. Jesse shook his head and rubbed his eyes before brushing his bloodstained hair back over his ears and nodding at his partner. She watched him for a second, waiting to see if he had recovered enough to move, before shoving him into the incredibly narrow stairwell.
As they descended, Deb heard the skybox rip from its mooring and crash to the ground. The door they had entered was torn from the frame and a narrow shaft of light followed them down. They ran in dizzying circles down what seemed like dozens of floors, passing other small emergency exit entrances on the way down. When they finally reached the bottom, debris following them the whole way, they burst into a familiar room.
Cages, welded from squares of chain link fence, filled the room. Several pieces of the ceiling had collapsed, crushing the makeshift jail in several spots. The high windows were almost completely opaque with dust and the entire room was eerily quiet. Jesse drew the hatchet, Deb having lost hers in the fight on the roof and both having lost their carbines, and led the way into the large room.
Deb could see the corner of one of the nearby cages was split, welds shattered, and there were no people inside. Creeping closer she saw bits of red cloth on the sharp edges of the cage. She couldn’t tell if from entering or exiting the small cell. Jesse brought them to the edge of the wall where they knew the main stairs would take them down to the motor pool and decided to head that way. Out of the darkness there was a low scraping noise and both froze to listen.
A woman’s body walked into Jesse’s limited view. He hesitated and the figure turned toward him, dragging movement on one broken ankle. The torso was crushed and the clearly dead woman had a footlong vertical slice across her sizable abdomen. A bubble stretched from the wound, and Jesse could see her organs pushing against the fatty film trying to escape. As she stepped, the yellowish membrane jiggled with the fluid of the woman’s viscera.
The corpse turned and shuffled toward him. He waited and swung the small ax, aiming for the head but only catching a glancing blow against the front of the gray face. The flesh from the bridge of the creature’s nose peeled downward, leaving a flap against the neck as it reached and snapped with bare teeth. The creature stumbled as Jesse raised the melee weapon again and gave a killing blow into the center of the forehead.
The corpse fell forward onto the stretchy membrane and the weight of the fall caused it to burst. The woman’s intestines flooded from the wound onto the concrete floor. The dead stench of evacuated bowels filled the air and Jesse and Deb both gagged as the sticky fluid flowed over their boots. Several other breathy growls and the sound of snapping teeth emerged from the darkness.
Jesse grabbed at the handle of his ax embedded in the dead being’s skull and only succeeded in dragging the body through the rotten entrails. Deb grabbed his hand and pulled, forcing him to leave their only weapon. She led the way, running them down the wall toward the exit. A pair of women met them from a perpendicular corridor of cages and Deb shoved them to the side and continued to run. The women were joined by several others and the group chased Deb and Jesse down the outer edge of the room. The door was only a dozen feet away.
Two more figures appeared in between Deb and the door. She almost missed them since the biting corpses were only a few feet tall, reaching with their tiny hands toward the living.
Bastards, you bastards locking kids in cages, she thought as she raised her boot toward the nearest child’s body. She kicked it away as Jesse did the same to the second. There was no time to stop and they flew into the large stairwell with moments to spare. Both panted in the dust as the women’s corpses pounded on the door.
“Let’s go,” Jesse said, taking the lead to drag the exhausted Deb down the steps to the motor pool. As they entered that room they felt another massive aftershock. The floor was cracked and Jesse could see most of the storage racks had fallen to the ground. The smell of fuel was overpowering as the remaining drums had been knocked around by falling wreckage. They sprinted into the wide open expanse, dodging twisted metal and blocks of ceiling rubble and looking for a way to escape.
A wall to their left began to shed the outer layer of mortar at Deb and Jesse’s feet. It sloughed off from the building’s vibration as if the wall itself turned to mud and both runners slipped on the sudden underfoot obstacle. Moments later, the brick itself fell the opposite direction, into the set of middle offices splitting the large warehouse-like area in two.
“Look,” Deb yelled, barely audible in the continuing crash. “Van!”
Jesse followed where she was pointing and saw a white panel van in the middle of the floor. Had the wall not collapsed, the van would have been hidden and probably never found. A burst of laughter escaped his lips as he ran through the crumbled pieces of the department, Deb following behind.
They reached the van in a matter of moments, throwing open the driver and passenger doors to jump inside. Jesse slumped into the driver’s seat and found a set of keys dangling from the ignition. The seats were torn and the van smelled like cigarette smoke, but Jesse had never felt more relieved and grateful to have a working vehicle. Thank you Neighbors, he thought as he grabbed the dangling keys.
Both doors slammed, only barely closing out the bedlam as Jesse started the engine and threw the transmission into drive. He sped forward and steered onto an upward sloping ramp, emerging in the western p
arking lot as the warehouse ceiling crashed down just behind.
Jesse rushed to reach the far side of the lot in the abandoned van before screeching to a halt, panting and covered in thick gray grime. They both sat silently catching their breath before Deb reached to the back. The rear of the van was open with no seating, packed with cardboard boxes. She opened the nearest and pulled out a neon-colored flyer with a familiar message. She crumpled the paper and threw it into the back. They watched the black smoke billowing from the center of the wrecked amphitheater for several minutes. Deb finally spoke.
“We have to go back for them,” she croaked, barely able to make words. The ground rumbled still, even from this distance, and pieces of the building continued to shed. Jesse looked around and shook his head.
“No, we can’t. We follow the plan. We head to their Lone Star Outpost, meet Lars, Ice, and Ricky. If Kahn makes it out, he’ll head there too.” Jesse paused, looking at his partner and sighing. “It was his plan; he made us promise. We need to stick to that. He’d do the same.”
“What if they need help?” Deb asked, shaking her head as well. Jesse looked in the rear view mirror as another hundred-foot-tall piece of the outer wall crumbled to dust. He thought of Kahn, trapped in the hallway on the same side of the building without the luxury of an emergency staircase to take him to safety.
Nation Undead (Book 2): Collusion Page 28