There were more targets than he had bullets for, and even with Gauge’s assistance, there was no way their combined marksmanship skills could stop the horde arrayed in front of them before it overran them completely. He and Gauge still had their MP5Ks, but to raise them would mean putting his only source of illumination down. He wouldn’t be able to see what he was shooting at.
Escape to the left and right were also being cut off by more of the zombies. Cutter sucked air through his teeth. There would be no running. The only way to any semblance of safety was to shoot their way out or get through the door behind him—the door that was still locked.
He felt a tug at his back. “What?” He shifted and prepared to turn around and see if he could help get the door open any faster.
“Hold still, Jack.”
Morgan was pulling items from his pack.
“Here.” She dropped something weighty into his left hand. His fingers instinctively clenched around it.
The creatures continued to approach at a run. He could start shooting and take a few out, but it would do little good.
How many—?
Gauge jumped one step ahead of him. The big man leveled his miniature howitzer and opened up all kinds of downrange fifty-caliber hellfire. Betty spat hot lead and zombie heads exploded, one after another. It was sheer conditioned reflex that caused Cutter to join in and send his own head busters downrange to slap wetly into skulls.
A creature dropped with each round fired, but they weren’t dropping fast enough.
They kept coming.
And, just then as the realization hit him that they were going to be overwhelmed, his gun clicked on empty. He was about to shift the Glock to his left hand and raise the MP5K when he again took notice of what Morgan had placed there—an M84, flash bang grenade. He lifted the grenade and pulled the pin with his right-hand pinky and lobbed the canister in front of him so it would roll in front of the advancing zombies. Morgan had already spun toward the building and was working on the door again. Gauge continued to drop bodies with each shot.
“FB out!” Cutter barked and clamped his eyes closed. The grenade went off with a loud bang that he felt deep inside his chest. He saw a mass of red spidery veins through his closed eyelids. When his vision darkened again, he half-opened his eyes and scanned the scene.
The creatures had all stopped as if they’d hit a wall of fire. Some had fallen to their knees. But those that had were already reeling and getting back up, one by one, while the rest continued their forward stagger.
In the spill of light from his Glock-mounted flashlight, Cutter noticed that both Gauge and Morgan were observing the aftereffects of the grenade as well. The bright flash and thundering explosion had slowed the things, but it had not stopped them for more than a second or two.
“I can’t get the lock open, Jack. It’s going to take too long on the door,” Morgan said. “I don’t know how many tumblers it has in it yet. I thought I had most of them bounced, but—”
“But what, Morgan?” he asked quickly. “Work fast. I mean faster than you have ever done this before. Those things aren’t going to stop and wait for you.”
“I know,” she snapped as she turned again.
Wait? Oh, yeah. Cutter realized then what he could do. He should have done it the moment Morgan had hesitated.
Back away, shoot the lock—
No…wait…that would—
The big steel door behind him suddenly swung open.
“Hurry,” a voice inside the building said.
~26~
CULLING
“About time you showed up,” Dr. Martinez said as she closed the door behind them all and shined her flashlight on the floor in front of them.
Cutter breathed a sigh of relief. “How in the hell?” he asked her as he backed away, head cocked sideways.
“You were hired to protect me, Mr. Cutter. And yet you abandoned me with those stupid Russian children.”
A loud boom sounded behind them. The zombies had reached the door. Gauge was already working with Morgan to roll a large spool of coiled wire up against the doorframe. She had lit a small hand-held lantern that gave off just enough light to see by, which she had strapped to her arm.
Cutter stared at the nearby door with a single thought on his mind. Those things had ripped the heads off two men. They had to be immensely strong to have done that. A simple steel door wouldn’t stop them for long.
Not much I can do about it now. Shaking his head to clear it, he turned. Dr. Martinez was staring at him. In the light spill of her flashlight, he saw that her brows were scrunched behind her glasses and her lips were drawn up tight. She was pissed—probably for abandoning her. Couldn’t be helped. He ignored her silent protest and turned a bit further toward the sprawling interior that unfolded behind her.
Huge machines filled most of the empty space, along with man-sized ceramic insulators and metal conduits and connector junctions tucked neatly inside of steel cages. The room smelled of ozone and old grease. All the signs hanging on chain-link dividers were written in big bold Cyrillic lettering, which he couldn’t read. But also present on the signs were the familiar lightning bolt symbols, which themselves were a fairly universal marking for “touch this when you don’t know what the hell you are doing, and you will die.”
Dr. Martinez blocked his path. “Have you been listening to me, Mr. Cutter? Do you understand your responsibility here?”
“Yeah,” he said absently.
“Then you should know—”
“Shhh,” he warned, finger on lips.
“What?”
He stood there for a moment listening to the booming echoes from the door Morgan and Gauge had barricaded. Can those things get through? If they—? Could they even—? He was drawing a blank.
Do what’s important first.
“Morgan, do you think you can get the power back on? Find a way to fire up these—generators. That’s what they are, right?”
She nodded an affirmative and grabbed Gauge by the sleeve and led him away.
“I do not appreciate you shushing me, Mr. Cutter,” Dr. Martinez said.
“Call me Jack.”
“Mr. Cutter,” she said with emphasis, “I do not appreciate the very fact that you abandoned me so easily. That was very unprofessional. You were hired to—”
He held a hand up to interrupt her. “Yeah, I know about that. Neither do I. Not happy about it either. I’m sorry.”
His answer seemed to stop her in her tracks before she could build up any kind of steam. She gave him a puzzled look of reappraisal and folded her arms across her chest. “You still shouldn’t have left me with them.”
“No, I shouldn’t have,” he said with conviction. “How did you get in here?”
“Long story,” she said. “We have to do what’s important first.”
He nodded. His appraisal of her clicked a notch into the positive direction.
She continued, “We need to find the artifact, and we don’t have much time to do it.”
One click negative. He stared at her for a long moment. At first, he wanted to ask her why it was so damn important when compared to the flesh-eating monsters pounding away right outside the door.
Then he changed his mind.
Then he changed it again. “Are you shitting me? What we need to do right this very minute is find a goddamned way to get the hell out of here and away from those…those zombie things.”
She backed away a step. “I am indeed not ‘shitting’ you, Mr. Cutter. You were hired to help me retrieve the device—the artifact. And I plan to locate it, with or without your help. But you were paid to help me get to it, so I expect you to do everything in your powers to assist me short of dying.”
Short of dying? He said nothing more. She had also said, “device,” letting something slip by that. What the hell did she mean? He opened his mouth to ask, but she continued to talk.
“You do realize just how important it is that we find it, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t understand. Why don’t you enlighten me.”
She puffed air out through her tight lips. “You wouldn’t be able to understand it if I did tell you the truth.”
“Try me.”
“We just need to find it.” She nodded her head up and down.
Cutter said nothing again in return. He folded his arms over his chest.
“Your wife, Mr. Cutter, would have understood why it is so important that we locate it quickly. She comprehended the importance of such a discovery and what it could mean for the world.”
He growled a little. “With a hundred of those goddamned zombie things just outside the door knocking to come in and eat us?” He sucked a whistling breath through his teeth. “No, my dead wife would have been smart enough to have recognized the reality of our situation and been recommending already that we should be working together to get the hell out of here. And that’s what I intend to do, Doc.”
“So you would just abandon me again?” Her hands raised in the air and she shook them and backed away.
She’s faking it. He knew it. He’d seen it before. But he didn’t care. He didn’t have the time right now to argue. He stepped past her.
“Morgan!” he bellowed over the pounding coming from the door behind him.
He found her next to a control panel filled with colored buttons that made little sense to him when he examined it. She was running her hands up and down the buttons and switches as if she were searching for something specific. Gauge stood behind her, holding his penlight steady and moving his lips as he tried to sound out the Cyrillic writing on the panel. He wasn’t having much luck.
“Have you met your match, Jack?” Morgan asked, not looking back at him.
He shook his head. “How long?”
“I only need to find—”
“You walked away from me, Mr. Cutter.” It was Dr. Martinez. She had followed him. “Don’t do that again. You will lead me to the artifact, or your team will forfeit all payment for this assignment. That’s four million dollars, might I remind you.”
“Is that so?” he asked.
She held out the satellite phone he’d given her earlier. “Yeah. Go ahead, call home and find out.”
Cutter took the phone and clipped it to his belt. “We didn’t sign up to fight zombies.”
“You are being paid extremely well, Mr. Cutter. We are going after it, and that’s the final word on the matter.” She turned and walked away.
He watched her go, then let go of a held breath. Damn woman. She had almost made the short list of women he just could not get along with.
“That went well,” Morgan quipped. Gauge grunted a laugh.
Cutter fondled the phone he’d clipped to his hip. “Just get the damn power on, Morgan. We’ll figure something out from there.”
“We bugging out then, boss?”
“Yeah,” Cutter said. No amount of money is worth this much bullshit. He couldn’t lose Morgan or Gauge—not after losing Sharon in an all-too-similar situation. His own life didn’t matter so much, but their lives did. He’d gotten them into this by agreeing to take the gig, but he’d also find a way to somehow get them out. He only had to persuade Dr. Martinez to see things his way as well.
For her own damn good.
“Dr. Martinez?” Cutter had just about returned to where he thought she had disappeared to. He heard a noise just behind him and started to turn and—
A heavy weight slammed into him from behind, driving him to the ground and knocking the wind from his lungs. Something had landed on top of him, snarling in his ear like a rabid dog. He felt hot saliva trickle down his neck. He tried to turn.
Can’t—
Then fear took over, and his right hand came free. His shoulders bunched and rolled forward an inch, two inches. Somehow, he broke loose and rolled onto his back. Both hands shot up and grabbed at the blurry shape that had jumped him.
As the shape came into focus, red, satanic eyes filled with bloodlust stared down at him. Fetid breath expelled in his face and washed over him. He cringed and tried not to inhale. Slavering, pulled-back teeth clacked together and came for his throat, meaning to tear out a meaty chunk. The zombie on top of him was immensely powerful, much stronger than he was.
Twisting, rolling, he grappled with it, back and forth. It may have had more brute strength than he had, but it lacked the dexterity to use its strength. The thing shifted and went for his throat again, and he was suddenly free and able to get his left arm up and under the zombie’s chin before the slashing, carnivorous teeth could bite into his flesh.
Shrieking, the zombie redoubled its efforts, ripping at him with flailing arms and snapping at him as it struggled to get closer. The creature’s thrashing legs came up, knees first, narrowly missing his groin. He pushed with everything the sudden onset of fear had given him and gripped it by the throat and raised the thing’s head and—
The top of its head exploded like a rotten pumpkin.
The report of Gauge’s gunshot echoed from the distant walls in the cavernous building. Panting with relief, Cutter continued to hold the thing by the neck as he rolled out from underneath the dripping gore. He shoved what little he was still holding onto to his right side. He stared back at the thing as he lay next to it on the cold concrete floor, breathing hard, recovering.
In the sharp-angled shadows of the penlight Gauge held on the scene, Cutter saw that the thing next to him had once been human, but it was no longer human. It wore the gray overalls of a worker, but they were little more than shredded rags, and the flesh underneath was ravaged and torn as if it had been clawed and bitten many times. And after Gauge’s timely shot, it was nearly headless as well.
“Thanks,” Cutter breathed up at the man, his friend. Probably his best friend at the moment.
Gauge lowered Betty and the flashlight and nodded once.
“Where the hell did that thing come from?” Cutter asked, sucking in a final breath of recovery and expelling it languidly. Sitting up, he shook his arms to fling away some of the blood and gore that now covered him from head to toe and had added to his already damp shirt and tactical pants. Am I ever going to be clean again?
Gauge smiled a thin smile and held out his left hand. Just as the big man was pulling him up, a new scream split the air, echoing from the far end of the expansive interior space.
The post-fight-or-flight shakes that had just started to effect Cutter fled in an instant, and he again came to total and complete alertness.
~27~
FINDING MORE
Only a fraction of a second passed before Cutter had finished reloading and was moving toward the new sound, the new danger. Gauge was with him, elbow to elbow, making just enough room to operate their weapons without jamming each other up. They spread out as they raced past Morgan, who had just come to help them with the creature that had attacked Cutter.
“Eyes open,” Cutter said as they passed by her. “Protect her.”
She nodded an okay.
He raised his Glock with the mounted flashlight and swept the space in front of them with the fat beam. There were three paths they could take, left, right, and up the middle—the old Monty Hall problem. Which door has the prize? He didn’t know, and there was no game show host to open the door with the goat behind it and alter the odds.
“Where did that thing come from, do you think?” Cutter asked. Gauge indicated to the left. Cutter sighed and went with his gut. It was all he really had to go on. They approached the massive generators and split up when they reached them. He took the middle path between them while Gauge went to the right.
Cutter figured that there was still a good chance he’d guessed wrong, but he didn’t have much of a choice, either. He had to be correct, he thought as he glanced over his shoulder, worrying a bit about the two women he’d left behind, virtually unprotected. Morgan was sharp, though. She’d sort it out. Dr. Martinez, he was still unsure of how she would react to any true threats, but she’d survived
well enough so far.
Half-a-second later, he heard Betty’s powerful bark, but no second, follow-up shot. One target dispatched, certainly. Gauge required only a single round to neutralize anything smaller than an elephant.
No sooner than he had processed the gunshot and what it meant when his own light was falling on a moving shape in front of him. He zeroed in with the Glock, instantly spotlighting the new target and identifying it as a threat, closing quickly. He fired twice, a double-tap. He was a crack shot, but given the relatively small size of a 9-millimeter Parabellum, he needed to be certain that what he wanted to shoot dead, stayed dead.
Both his bullets slammed home less than an inch apart, causing the creature to fall sideways and drop into a convulsive fit as it bounced off the series of leg-sized pipes running alongside the massive generator to his right. As the thing died, it sprayed blood like a busted fountainhead then slumped into death.
He dropped a step, almost tripping over his own feet. Why do they bleed? It didn’t make any sense at the moment. All the zombies he’d seen on TV were just dead bodies filled with brownish goo, which was supposed to be some kind of putrid, rotting bodily fluids. These still sprayed oxygen-rich lifeblood, which meant they still had a heartbeat.
And that means—
He didn’t even want to consider the implications now as he prepared for more that might attack, but nothing else came at him.
Working his jaw back and forth to clear the lingering effects of the loud report, he skipped to make up his missing step and quickened his pace past the crumpled form of the dead zombie. He arrived at the end of the row the same time that Gauge did. They converged to cover each other and worked their way to the back of the building. Offices were to either side of them and were separated by painted walls and hip-high glass windows. Running down the center of them was a darkened hallway.
The terrible scream sounded again.
“You first.” Cutter gestured with his Glock.
Zombie Team Alpha Page 12