by Scott Reeves
When he had wheeled the desk chair over to her and pushed her toward it, she had sat down. He had wanted her to sit, and she had. That was some sort of a response, wasn’t it? Not attacking him was a response, wasn’t it? Maybe there was still something civilized left in her, something of her former self. Maybe she would recover from whatever malady had caused this.
Why had she come to him? He had killed her, and then she had come to him. He felt certain that she had deliberately sought him out, that she had somehow been drawn to him.
He touched the red cross on her forehead, sensing the hand of God at work. Then he touched the cross on his own forehead.
And that was the only interaction they had had. For the last fifteen minutes, she had simply sat there while he puttered around the building, exploring, considering his options.
What options were there at the end of the world?
A ringing noise that was frighteningly loud in the silence of the room startled him from his thoughts.
The fatline phone rang a second time.
He picked it up and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?” he asked.
“I got one!” said a man’s voice on the other end of the line, apparently speaking to someone with him. There were cheers in the background. “Sorry,” the man said, now speaking directly to Andy. “My name is Drake Wainright. What’s your name, sir?”
“Andy Watson,” said Andy.
“It’s good to meet you, Andy. Good to talk to a fellow survivor. Where are you, Andy?”
Andy searched his memory for the name of the skyscraper he had landed on. “I’m on the rooftop of the Murray Building, in some sort of maintenance bunker.” At least he thought that was the building name he remembered from the database. Fear had practically numbed his brain, washing away all his recently acquired knowledge.
“The spaceport? Great! That’s exactly where we’re headed, Andy.”
“We?”
“I’ve got an army, Andy. A band of loyal men and women who intend to survive this catastrophe. Will you join us, Andy?”
Andy looked out through the window, at the columns of smoke and flame rising all along the horizon, at the hazy dust clouds left in the air by the implosion of numerous skyscrapers. Skyscrapers that were virtually worlds unto themselves, teeming with millions of people who lived and worked inside. Millions of people who had died when the buildings collapsed. He thought of the psychopathic people rampaging just beyond the concrete wall of the maintenance building in which he had taken refuge. He stared at the poor unfortunate woman whom he had killed, who had risen from the dead and now sat waiting…waiting for what?
All in all, it was clear that he was in the midst of a planet-wide catastrophe. What if it was a galactic catastrophe? What if, after five thousand years, the stage was being set for the long-awaited return of Christ?
Andy shrugged and said to Drake, “Sure, I’ll join you.”
What else was there to do?
“Great!” Drake said. “Welcome aboard. Just sit tight up there, Andy. We’re coming, and we’ll be in touch again.”
Drake disconnected and the line went dead.
With nothing else to do at the moment, Andy decided to search the woman for clues to her identity. He found a business card in the breast pocket of her blouse. “Joyce Rider,” it said. “Pastor, Caldorian Church of Jesus.”
Andy gently tucked the card back into her pocket.
“Well, Joyce,” he said. “Just sit tight. Help is on the way.”
When he said it, he meant that Drake and his army were on the way. But as he considered the words he’d just spoken, it occurred to him that help from the stars might be on the way as well, and that a spaceport would be one of the first stops of any rescuing starship. That was probably why Drake and the others were coming up here. He kicked himself for not having realized it earlier.
He was right where he needed to be when help arrived. Once again, he sensed the hand of God at work.
He went to the long window and stared out across the broken horizon, thoughtfully stroking his chin.
Malfred Gil
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
5:50 PM Planetary Standard Time
Mal and his new friend Bin were crawling toward through the ducts. Mal was beginning to realize the hopelessness of finding Samala. She could be anywhere by now, maybe not even in the ducts anymore. She might be out in a hallway, having already been bitten by one of the psychos, dead and risen, shambling about looking for someone to eat. He didn’t even know where they were in the ducts anymore; in his aimless search for Samala, they had strayed off his memorized path a while ago.
He was beginning to think maybe he should give up trying to find her. There was always snatch to be found somewhere. Why risk himself for any one particular snatch, no matter how juicy it was? Especially when the odds were so long on ever finding it again?
“Maybe we should just head for the rooftop,” he said to Bin. The older man was a few feet behind. Mal could hear him wriggling along, the metal popping up and down beneath his weight.
“What about Samala?” Bin said. He said her name with a strange dreamy tone that bothered Mal, mainly because it soundly oddly affectionate and admiring, the way someone in love might speak of her. It was creepy.
But Mal didn’t let on that it bothered him. He didn’t want to cause friction with his newfound ally. “Well, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I need to face reality. I’m probably not going to find her.”
“No, probably not,” Bin agreed.
“It’s a big city, after all. She could have gotten anywhere by now. And she’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.” He doubted it, but he needed to believe the lie. “Me and you, we need to start worrying about us. The rest of Union will be sending help. We’ve got to believe that. And when they do, the obvious first place they will come is to the spaceports.”
“Right,” Bin said. “And there’s one on the roof of our building.”
“So we need to get to the roof, just like I said.”
“Lead the way, kid. I’m right behind you.”
That’s when the fatline phone rang. Mal stopped crawling, his heart suddenly racing. They had only just retrieved the phone, and now it was ringing! He wondered who might be calling. Mal fished it from his pocket, flipped the cover up and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?” he said. His hand trembled and his voice quivered with excitement.
“Hello,” a man’s voice said. “I’m Rodor Batsalam. To whom am I speaking?”
“Mal Gil,” said Mal.
“Very pleased to meet you, Mal. It’s great to talk to a fellow survivor. Where are you, Mal?”
“In an air duct with Bin…” Mal covered the mouthpiece with his hand and whispered back to Bin, “What did you say your last name was?”
“I didn’t. What does it matter?”
Mal took his hand off the mouthpiece. “I’m in an air duct with Bin.”
“In the air ducts?” Rodor said, obviously thinking it was an unusual place to be.
“Yeah, in the air ducts. Long story.”
“Which building are you in?” Rodor asked.
“The Murray Building. Third floor. Third floor above ground, not below.”
“Excellent. Mal, I’m with an army. We intend to survive this disaster. Will you and Bin join us?”
Mal put his hand over the mouthpiece again and whispered back to Bin, “He wants to know if we’ll join his army.”
“Tell him yes, of course. Why are you checking with me first?”
Mal glared through the darkness at the man. Why was he checking with Bin first, as if he needed the older man’s approval? Why was the man so combative? Why couldn’t he have stumbled across a friendlier companion?
He took his hand off the mouthpiece and said, “Sure, we’ll join you. You want us to come to you?”
“No, we’re several floors below you. We’ll come to you,” Rodor said. “We’ll be heading upward in a few minutes. We’re going t
o the rooftop. We’ll meet up along the way.”
“To the spaceport?” Mal asked.
“That’s right, the spaceport.”
“Great. Me and Bin were going to head up there anyway. That’s where the rescue ships will come first, we figure. It will be nice to have some company on the way up.” Not to mention the protection of an army. He doubted he and Bin could have made it alone.
“Meet us at the central elevators,” Rodor said. “We’ll be riding the elevator up from five floors below ground. If we get to your floor before you, we’ll wait for you. You do the same. We’ll be in touch.”
“Okay,” Mal said.
Rodor disconnected and the line went dead.
“We’re going to meet them at the central elevators,” Mal said.
“Fantastic,” Bin said.
They crawled through the ducts for another few minutes before they found a duct that let out into one of the main corridors of the building. Mal said a quick mental goodbye to Samala, wished her luck, and then left the air ducts behind.
Rodor Batsalam
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
6:05 PM Planetary Standard Time
Getting from the governmental bunker had been relatively easy. He’d passed through government-only passages that were practically deserted; there were very few government employees, since Mac did most of the administrative tasks that had in ancient times been relegated to human functionaries.
Anyone he encountered, he had simply raised his revolver and shot right between the eyes. They were government, after all, and it was government who was ultimately responsible for the poisoned society that had spawned the beast who had killed his daughter. Mac was the biggest part of the government. Soon, once the PRA took care of business on the spaceport, Mac would be dealt with.
Torl Welland and Clem Wilson, the two men he had met between the government passageways and the PRA lair, had not met with a bullet between the eyes because they were not government. They were survivors, and that meant they had been chosen by God to be a part of the new order.
The three of them had encountered a few risen dead on the way to the lair, but they had escaped, either by fleeing or by fighting. The new recruits were good fighters, and the risen dead were easily dealt with when you stood up to them.
Now, Rodor, Drake Wainright, and their small army were advancing through a narrow side hallway five floors below the Murray Building. They had chosen to take the less direct route to the central elevators. They were bypassing the main hallways, which were wide enough to accommodate dozens of people walking side by side. Infected people roamed the main hallways and corridors, either fighting amongst themselves or looking for uninfected. Also, the open shops lining the main hallways held even more infected and offered too many opportunities for an ambush by the infected. There was too much activity in the main hallways; too much to keep an eye on.
No, they had decided the side hallways were the best. These were narrow, not made to accommodate more than a couple of people walking side by side. The side hallways were lined with closed doors: entrances to apartments, maintenance rooms, and other places not open to the public. The side hallways were used only by local folk, and so weren’t as crowded. There wasn’t as much to keep an eye on.
Thus, it was a simple matter to blast away any infected that got in the Army’s way. Rodor and Drake were in the lead, so if any infected confronted them from the front, either of them did the honor of vaporizing the beast. If an infected appeared to their rear, the two soldiers at the end did the honors.
Rodor was tempted to use his revolver to dispatch the infected, but resisted the urge, since he needed to conserve his bullets. Besides, he had never used a force rifle, and was actually enjoying the clean way that it got rid of its targets. A quick pull of the trigger, no kick, a brief pulse of light, a puff of smoke, a shower of ash, and the infected were gone, erased from existence. No bodies to clog the hallways. That would be good for later on. Once they had taken care of business on the roof and then cleansed the infected from the city, there would be no bodies and no mess left behind. The survivors could simply move right in with no trouble.
Rodor looked at his watch as they trudged along in silence, and realized that it was now just about an hour since doomsday had begun. Strange to think that in the course of a single hour, an entire civilization could collapse. And not just civilization here on Caldor. Though he had no hard evidence to back up his belief, he had faith that God’s wraith was even now spreading across the entirety of galactic civilization. His daughter was being avenged. The shit of a civilization that had destroyed his daughter was now being flushed down God’s toilet.
Their journey toward the elevators was slow going, not because they were being harried by the infected, but because the immense wooden box was difficult to maneuver: heavy, and hard to steer around corners. Thankfully, they wouldn’t be burdened with pulling the thing much longer. Once they reached the elevators, it would be a simple ride to the rooftop. No infected to deal with on the way, either. That task would come later, once they built up their army.
The elevators weren’t for public use. Most people these days traveled by transmat. The elevators were mainly a relic from the time before matter transmission technology had made them obsolete. Nowadays they were mainly used to move freight that was too sensitive to be sent through the transmat. Since there wasn’t much at all that couldn’t be sent through transmat, the elevators were rarely used. Hence there wasn’t likely to be any infected inside them.
No, once they reached the elevators, they were safe until they reached the roof.
Unfortunately, there was one obstacle between them and the elevators: a long stretch of the main hallway. About a quarter of a mile ahead, the narrow side hall they were now traversing let out into one of the main hallways that radiated like spokes from the hub of the elevator cluster at the center of the building. There was no way to avoid the hallway, and none of them were looking forward to it. They had all seen, on the closed-circuit feeds back in the PRA lair, how crowded the hallway was. Infested with infected.
As they neared the intersection, a steady stream of infected could be seen shuffling along the main hallway. Rodor and Wainright vaporized anything that moved across the intersection.
When they finally reached the end of their narrow hall, the column of soldiers behind them stopped and waited as Rodor and Wainright peered cautiously around the corner to get the lay of the land…
…and found themselves staring straight down the barrel of a blast rifle attached to the forearm of a robocop. The thing had apparently been drawn by their shots at the infected.
Rodor shouted a warning to the soldiers and ducked back into the side hall. But Drake didn’t react quickly enough, or perhaps couldn’t have anyway. The robocop’s gun spat a burst of plasmic light at Drake, and the man’s head exploded, spraying blood and bone fragments across the hallway wall.
Everyone in the side hallway scattered like rats. Rodor slammed his fist against the control pad beside the door immediately behind him. Fortunately, the door wasn’t locked; it slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and he dove inside. As the door slid shut behind him, he saw a burst of light go shooting past where he had been standing seconds earlier.
He could only pray that his soldiers had reacted in time, and found safety in other nearby rooms.
But even more than their safety, he prayed for the safety of the thing that was in the immense wheeled box they were taking to the roof. Although he hadn’t gotten a good look at the robocop, he had gotten enough of one to know that it was too big to fit into the side hallway. But it could still blast the box apart with its guns.
Let the robocop kill all his soldiers, but please, God, don’t let it destroy the thing in the box. If that happened, their revolution might be over before it had barely begun, and with it, the new world order.
Bin Jamin
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
6:05 PM Planetary Standar
d Time
Bin didn’t know why he had stayed with the kid so long. His appetites didn’t extend to boys. Maybe it was because he felt some sort of kinship with the kid, because both their cocks had been inside Samala so recently. Maybe he liked toying with the kid, enjoyed following Mal on his futile search for his dead girlfriend.
Maybe, too, it was because he had seen the crazy people in the apartments he had passed before he had encountered Mal. He had seen the woman rise from the dead and attack his young companion.
Something strange was obviously going on, and maybe he was sticking with the kid because unconsciously he thought the kid might prove useful in whatever trouble lay ahead.
He had listened to Mal’s description of how everyone had gone crazy violent, how he had barely made it out of the corridor after leaving Samala’s apartment.
But he hadn’t really believed the kid, despite the things he had seen. He never really believed until they came out of the air ducts and into a main corridor.
They stood against the wall, the duct opening at their feet, while a grisly scene unfolded all around them. People knelt on the ground, packs of them feeding like wild animals on human carcasses. Others shambled about with vacant eyes, shuffling along in twisted postures as if their bones were broken in multiple places, not moving with any destination in mind, just tottering along because they were driven to move by some mindless instinct. A lot of them sported ghastly wounds: wattles of shredded flesh dangling from their arms, their legs, their faces; gobs of entrails hanging from gaping wounds in their chests, their stomachs, their legs. It was a wonder they could even move at all. There was blood everywhere: smeared on the walls, the floor, and the people.
The long, wide corridor stretched into the distance from left to right, as far as they could see. As he and Mal stood there, formulating their next move, it seemed that everyone within sight turned as one and looked at the two of them. Every damn blood-ringed mouth opened, baring blood-stained teeth as they hissed and growled, sensing new meat.