The Apocalypse Crusade 2

by Peter Meredith

  But then he was out of ammo and they were on him with their rending claws. His screams joined Cheryl’s as claws pinned him while others scratched at his face and arms…but where were the teeth? He wasn’t being bitten! His screams were more out of terror than pain. It was a few seconds before his panicked mind recognized the duct tape covering the zombie’s mouths. It made no sense until the boy in the striped shirt came up. His mouth was free of the tape and Benjamin saw the wickedness in the grin.

  He also saw the hunger there, and soon he felt it as well. The boy wanted Benjamin’s blood all for himself and had contrived to make it so. Benjamin’s death was slow—the boy had small teeth. They were like a rat’s: gnawing and gnawing, and then there came the slurping and the erotic panting. Benjamin took twenty-two minutes to die and all the while Cheryl fought against the zombies holding her down. They were relentless in their desire to eat her but they could not get past the duct tape. She was battered by their fists and lost an eye to their claws, but she was very much alive and conscious when the boy waddled up with a belly ballooned by Benjamin’s blood.

  “Mine,” he whispered as he knelt over his feast.

  Chapter 32

  Anna’s Victory

  10:58 p.m.

  With the all the shooting inside the building and all the pounding from the outside, Benjamin and Cheryl’s screams went unheard, however the fact that they weren’t at their posts guarding the prisoners was remarked upon when Eng slipped out of the store room looking for a way to get his cuffs off. He figured there’d be keys to the cuffs in practically every desk drawer.

  He never had the chance to find out. One of the dispatchers came hurrying out of the women’s room and practically ran right into him. The two stared at each other and then the woman said: “I’m gonna tell.” Eng shrugged as best he could with his hands cinched behind his back. As the woman scurried off, presumably to “tell” he looked around at the situation.

  It wasn’t good.

  The gaping holes in the front door were being slowly widened with each passing minute and now huge cracks connected them. It was only a matter of time before they came crashing down from the weight of the beasts pressing on them. The door that led to the office wing was already bent on its hinges and now Chuck and PFC Max Fowler were taking turns shooting through the gap. It was slowing the zombies but not stopping them. The hallway of the incarceration wing was jammed with the undead. They were so densely packed that they could hardly swing their arms enough to pound the door. The door was safe, but the exit was blocked completely.

  Not only were the people in the station trapped, the trap was closing in on them.

  Eng went back to the storeroom. “We’re screwed,” he announced, and then described what he’d seen.

  Minutes later, Deckard came back, holding his M16 at the ready. “Where’d your guards go?” he asked.

  “They did what any smart person would have, they ran away,” Anna answered. She paused, swallowed loudly, and then asked: “How bad are we screwed? I mean is there any chance of a rescue?”

  “Slim,” was all Deckard could honestly say. “We’re hoping for a couple of Blackhawks to get here before the doors come down. You say they ran away? Out the back, I’m guessing.” She nodded, trying her best to be agreeable. He gave them a hard look, which melted away with the stress he was under. “Stay here, please, for your own sakes. Some of us are…a little wired right now. You might get hurt.”

  “What’s he mean by that?” Allen asked as Deckard left the room. “We didn’t do anything wrong.” They were all nodding but jumped as Deckard opened the loading dock door. Cheryl was just about dead and still her screams cut the night like a razor.

  Meeks looked like he was about to be sick. He was imagining that it was himself out there. Eng smirked at this and said: “And that’s how you thin the herd.” Meeks snarled something about revenge, making Eng shake his head. “You should be thanking me. You heard Deckard: a couple of Blackhawks. According to my count, there were thirty-one people and a dog in this station. Now there are only twenty-nine, and the dog. Your chances of getting on one of those choppers just went up. You’re welcome.”

  “You knew they were going to die out there,” Meeks accused.

  “I didn’t know, actually,” Eng answered. “But truthfully, I didn’t care.” They paused in the conversation as the door to the loading dock closed and Deckard walked by. His face was drawn down and the lines produced aged him by ten years. He had crept out to the edge of the building and had seen the horde of beasts crowding over the two bodies and he had seen the others straining at their leashes in the tree line.

  There were hundreds.

  In a flash he saw the trap for what it was; it made him want to gag. This was a step up from rocks tied to hands. This was diabolical. This was planned evil. This was why he knew he was going to die sometime in the next half hour. He hadn’t been lying when he had told the prisoners there was only a slim chance at being rescued, and now, seeing this trap, he would say their chances were even lower.

  With that dark thought in mind, he went to where the dispatchers were working. Under orders from General Collins, they were trying to find where many important, but abandoned items belonging to the National Guard were. During the scramble for men to hold the line, equipment such as guns, ammo, fuel, water, and even batteries, had been left behind, either in trucks on the side of the road or in warehouses. They were also making lists of men: who was where and under what command. Two of the ladies were trying to keep track of the helicopters that were constantly whipping by overhead. It was their job to coordinate between the aviation side and the supply side of the army. Deckard knew there were supposed to be specifically trained soldiers doing this, but where they were, he didn’t know.

  The women worked with one eye on their computer screens and with the other on the doors that were minutes from coming down. They spoke in a high-pitched jabber and took many tiny sips of air instead of normal breaths. Deckard wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a few of them had wet themselves in their fear; if he had known, he would have understood.

  He sidled up to Courtney, trying not to let on that he was a s scared as they were. “Where are we on the choppers? You gave Collins everything he asked for, he’s not going to screw us is he?” She started to shrug, but he turned her chair around to face him. Next to her, Sundance gave a growl of warning and showed some teeth. Deckard glared right back and said: “I need an honest answer.”

  “He’ll come through,” she answered. “I just don’t know when. Jenny is working the choppers, you can ask her.”

  Jenny didn’t look up from her computer as she said: “Fifteen minutes give or take…but they’ve been saying that for the last hour, so I don’t really know. I don’t even know where they are.”

  “Then stop what you’re doing and find those choppers!” Deckard snapped. “I want them here in fifteen minutes like they promised. The rest of you prepare yourselves to either get on those choppers or to fight. As of this moment, you’re done working for Collins. You’re working for me now.”

  “What we’re doing is very important,” Courtney said. She had tears in her eyes; she didn’t think the Blackhawks would get there in time to save them and she wanted her last moments to be in helping the situation and not spent cowering in the corner crying. “This will save lives and besides, stopping now won’t get those choppers here any faster.”

  A grimace crossed over Deckard’s features. He was bristling, ready to either snap out a harsh reply or pull the trigger on his M16 and put a hole in each of the computers. Thuy appeared at his elbow. As usual, he calmed when in her presence and as usual, she had a grasp of the entire conversation even though there was no way she could have heard it all. She inferred what she hadn’t heard from their expressions, and by the way they held themselves.

  “Courtney, we will proceed from this point as if the deadline for our rescue is set in stone,” Thuy said, confidently. “Have the other operators
make preparations to abandon their positions. Back up the files that need to be saved and then have them inform their contacts among the various National Guard units that they will be out of the loop for a minimum of one hour. Deckard, you will do the same thing with the personnel here. Prepare them to make a quick and possibly bloody exit from this building.”

  Bloody exit…those words went deep into him, echoing down to the crevice where he hid his fear. It bloomed like poison.

  Perhaps she saw. Thuy put a soft hand on his arm. “We’ll make it out, right?” she asked.

  You will, he thought to himself. “Yes, without question,” he said. Inside he crushed down on his fear, pushing it back down into its crevice. He even managed to give her a smile. It would be his last smile of the day.

  The second he left her, the smile morphed into a scowl. He wore it as he began to round up the people who weren’t currently fighting, bringing them to sit in the call station, which was the geographic center of the building. The prisoners were also brought forward to sit slightly apart from the others. Bob and Allen, the two men who had come in with the dead Mexican sat at the edge of the room. So far, their eyes were clear, but no one trusted them.

  “M-Me and Allan sh-should be armed,” Bob said in a light stutter that went hand-in-hand with the sound of the guns blasting away. “And we shouldn’t have to wear these stupid cuffs. We didn’t do anything and besides we can fight. You have to let us fight. At least for our survival. It would be inhumane if you didn’t.”

  Thuy cast an eye Deckard’s way suggesting that she thought they were correct, but before he could say anything, another of the prisoners spoke up. “And what about us?” Meeks asked. “The least you can do is uncuff us. I don’t know about them, but I am innocent. I was wholly within the law. You may not like it and I’m sorry it went down the way it did, but this…you can’t do this. You can’t leave us cuffed and unarmed, and pretend that you’re the good guys.”

  “Uncuff them, but no weapons yet,” Thuy ordered.

  Deckard handed his M16 to Dr. Wilson, knowing it would be dangerous to bring it among the five prisoners. “Cover me,” he said to the doctor.

  Wilson chuckled. “Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

  “No,” Deckard replied. He wasn’t blind to the desperation in their eyes. And he hadn’t forgotten that two of the five were mass murderers and that Meeks had been willing to kill in cold blood. Deckard ordered the five to face the wall. When they did, he went to Anna first. She was the smallest and with her mangled left hand, she was physically the least dangerous. When she tried to turn around after the cuffs were off, he pressed her face against the wall.

  “Not yet. Not until I say so.” She smiled as if to say there were no hard feelings, but she couldn’t hide the cold look in her eyes. He went next to Allen and then to Bob. Next, he went to Meeks. One cuff was off when two different screams lit the air.

  One was Burke who yelled: “They’re in! The door is down! Everyone get ready.”

  The other was Jenny who whooped: “The Blackhawks are almost here! I just got in touch with the pilots, we have two inbound in ten minutes.”

  Meeks spun suddenly. He was smaller than Deckard and fast as a snake. He was also a trained FBI agent and knew a dozen ways to break the grip of a bigger man. Deckard was trained as well and, more significantly, he had been trained to a higher standard than what was mass-produced in Quantico. The spin didn’t catch him unprepared. A quick step back gave him room and then he leapt up and in, surprising Meeks and catching him square in the diaphragm with his full weight driving in behind his right knee.

  Meeks went down gasping for air as Deckard stepped back, his eyes flicking to Eng, whom he suspected of being the most dangerous of them. Eng smirked in appreciation of the move and said: “My cuffs? I’ll be good. I promise.”

  “No, not yet.” He strode to Wilson and took back his M16 and then glanced to the front where Burke, Johnny Osgood, Lieutenant Pemberton and two of his troopers were killing the zombies piling in through the collapsed front door. For the moment, the flying lead was holding the beasts back. At the door to the office wing, Chuck was pointing for Max to join the fight at the front of the lobby, and in the call center, the women were pulling memory sticks from their computers and rushing to join the group waiting to leave. The situation was, for the moment, under control.

  It was a short moment.

  Deckard had to get to the front of the building. He could see the zombies blasting through the broken doors and the sound of gunfire was thunderous. He jerked a thumb toward the prisoners and was just yelling to Wilson: “Watch them closely,” when Anna made her move.

  The vial of Com-cells had sat in her bra all this time and now she fished it out. Calmly, she stepped behind Allan and took a hold of his collar. “Whatever you do, don’t move,” she said to him. Louder, she called out to Thuy: “Dr. Lee! Do you recognize this?”

  Thuy’s dark eyes went wide as she recognized the vial. “How? I mean…that’s not possi…” Her words faltered as her mind struggled to come to grips with what she was seeing and what it meant. She wanted to tell herself that Anna was bluffing, that the world was full of vials if one knew where to look…however Anna’s vial had a black top with a band of gold around it—the same ones they had used strictly for the Com-cell trials. They were exceedingly rare outside of a research lab; and in the hilly forests of the lower Catskills it would have been impossible to come across one.

  Logically, this meant Anna had to have picked it up in Walton, and this begged the question: if there weren’t Com-cells in it, why would she have bothered to steal it? There was just one answer: she wouldn’t have.

  The only conclusion Thuy could reach was that she had stolen it sometime before or during the trial, probably to give to the company she was spying for…and now she was threatening to release the Com-cells in a room crowded with people. Thuy glanced around; of the twenty-nine people trapped in the station, twenty-three of them were in the immediate vicinity and of those, only three were currently masked.

  “No one move!” Thuy commanded. The people weren’t stupid. They saw the vial and they knew where Anna had worked; they had frozen in place even before Thuy had spoken. “What do you want?” Thuy asked.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone, but I will if I have to,” Anna said. She held the vial up, ready to hurl it if need be. “I just want to get out of here, the same as all of you.”

  With zombies already in the building and now this, Thuy could feel her heart begin to jitter. It was a struggle to force her words to come out smoothly. “I already planned on taking you with us. I swear that is the truth.”

  “Sure, if there is enough room, right? That’s a big if, Thuy. Those helicopters fit eleven people. According to my math there’s going to be a few of us who are shit out of luck.”

  “They’ll take more,” Thuy said, though if this was true, she didn’t know. She had just assumed they would.

  Anna shook her head. “I’m not taking the chance. And besides, even if you were going to take us with you, weren’t you planning on having me jailed?” Thuy could only nod. There was no sense lying so obviously. “That’s not going to happen, what is going to happen is that the five of us prisoners are going out on the first chopper that lands. We’ll take five hostages with us. The rest of you can go on the second chopper.”

  The simple math before Thuy was appalling. Nineteen people on one Blackhawk? Her heart was skipping erratically now. She took a breath to steel herself before saying: “That’s unacceptable. Deckard, shoot her.”

  This made Anna laugh. She cocked her arm ready to wiz the vial. “If that gun moves everyone in this room will get a good coating of Com-cells in their purest form. Try me, Thuy. I would much rather get shot by your lap dog than turn into one of those things out there and I’d also much rather get shot than be left behind and eaten alive, and I would much rather get shot than be the scapegoat for this entire mess. So go ahead and raise that gun,
Deckard and see if I’m bluffing.”

  The gun in his hand felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. He knew she wasn’t bluffing. Slowly, he took his right hand away from the trigger housing and held it up. She beamed at him. “Here’s how this is going to work. Everyone will turn around. The five of us will each take one weapon and a hostage. The rest of you will face away until the chopper lands and then sayonara and good luck to you.”

  Thuy stood like marble: stiff, cold, brittle, beautiful. Behind her, heedless of the hostage drama playing out, men were cutting down the zombies who were now at the barrier of furniture. There was no more time for bargaining, but the number nineteen kept swimming through her mind. “Take two more hostages and we have a deal,” she tried.

  “No. You’re going to have to figure out who you want to sacrifice.” Anna’s smug face was full of glee as she added, “I doubt it’ll be you who volunteers to stay behind.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Anna. I will be the last to leave this building.” Thuy took a shaky breath and doomed herself by saying: “Everyone turn around. Whoever is chosen as a hostage, go quietly and without fuss. Anna will not kill you unless she has a reason to. Isn’t that right?”

  “Of course,” Anna said around a smile of victory.

  Chapter 33

  Revenge of the Damned

  11:22 p.m.