The Remaining: Extinction

by D. J. Molles

  Nate fumbled with the radio. “Tomlin! We need that ground-floor door open for us when we get there. They are right on our ass! And Paul, you need to hurry the fuck up! Our horde might hit the hospital before you can get in! You need to get there, man! Does everybody copy that?”

  Tomlin answered first. “I copy. The door’ll be open. Paul and Junior, are you guys gonna make it?”

  In the background of Paul’s response, Tomlin could hear their engine screaming to get them there. “We’re trying!” Paul shouted into the radio, his voice sounding garbled. “What happens if the hospital is surrounded?”

  “Then pull off,” Tomlin responded quickly. “If you can’t get in, then just find a clear road out of town and get gone! Nate, I got Joey and Brandy on the way down now to open the door for you. Get here, brother, and get here quick… I think I see you coming.”

  Nate dropped the radio. No response was needed.

  Up ahead, the parking lot of the hospital sprawled out. They had never removed any of the barricades that had been erected by the National Guard and FEMA. The place was still almost entirely surrounded by Jersey barriers and barbed wire. All but the narrow entrance on the south side of the hospital.

  Nate didn’t let up. He barreled for that little gap at almost eighty miles per hour, and if he chipped some skin off the side of the pickup truck, then oh fucking well.

  “We’re almost there,” Nate said to no one in particular. “Almost there…”

  They burst through the opening, missing the cement barriers by inches and careening into the parking lot. Nate slowed just enough to be able to cut a left turn without rolling the truck. The building rushed up at them, the burning fire standing right over their heads. Nate slammed on the brakes, hoping Devon didn’t take a dive.

  The front end of the truck stopped just a few feet short of the cement wall. Nate took the half second to put it in park, but left the keys in and left it running. He really didn’t give a shit what happened to the truck at that point. He was out of the car before it stopped rocking on its suspension.

  Devon climbed awkwardly out of the truck, favoring his right side.

  Ahead of them, the emergency exit attached to the ground-floor stairwell opened up and Joey was standing there waving and shouting at them. “C’mon, c’mon! Get inside!”

  Joey disappeared inside as Nate scrambled through the door. He could hear the earth-trembling roar of the horde behind them, but couldn’t see them yet. The emergency exit door was open just barely wide enough for them to squeeze through. Nate got in, then waited and pulled Devon through the door and slammed it closed. The floor of the stairwell was crammed full of various bulky items that looked like they’d had a long, violent trip down the stairwell. There were hospital beds, machinery, computers, and some chairs.

  Nate and Devon both heaved air.

  Brandy was on the flight of stairs above them. “You guys okay? You all right?”

  “We’re good,” Nate said breathlessly, then looked at Devon. “You good?”

  Devon waved a dismissive hand and headed for the stairs.

  Joey locked the doors. He and Nate started pushing the heavy equipment back in place. Nate supposed this was what counted as a barricade. Hopefully the locks would hold, and if they didn’t, hopefully all the trash piled in the doorway would at least deter them for long enough that they could get the hell off the roof.

  “Wait!” Nate grabbed his head. “What about Paul and Junior?”

  Joey shook his head. “Tell ’em to pull off! It’s too fucking close!”

  Nate grabbed a stair to get out of Joey’s way and keyed his radio. “Paul! Junior! Pull off! Get the fuck out of here! You ain’t got time to get inside!”

  Their response was filled with static. “What? We’re almost there!”

  Nate found himself shouting at the mic, like he knew he shouldn’t. “Pull! Off! You’re not going to get inside the hospital! Pull off!”

  “There’s no… Shit!”

  The transmission ended.

  Joey yelled at Nate, pointing at the stairs, and Nate realized that the sound of the horde had engulfed them again. Nate felt suddenly claustrophobic. A foot of cement between him and death. Extinction was just outside the door.

  He charged up the stairs.

  They made it to the second landing before the walls of the hospital started to shake.

  TWENTY-ONE

  MESSY

  WHEN THE GOING GETS tough, the tough get going. That’s what Tomlin believed his entire life. No matter the situation, he was always moving, always acting, always fighting. But as he stood there in the red-orange glow of the signal fire, looking out over the edge of the Johnston Memorial Hospital’s roof, for the first time in his entire life Tomlin found himself paralyzed.

  The world below him had turned into hell, and he stood on an island in the middle of it all.

  Firelight bathed a sea of faces three stories below him, so tightly packed that he could not see the bodies attached to the heads. The sea extended out into the darkness, unending, more than could be counted, more than he had seen or ever imagined to see. Beyond the reach of the firelight, the darkness boiled and squirmed. The stench of millions upon millions was horrendous. The sound of them was deafening. And this was no horde, not like any that he had ever seen before. They did not behave like the other infected. This was a hive, and they pushed and scrambled aggressively, but unlike the smaller hordes that he’d seen in the towns and small cities, these seemed to act with a complete lack of individual thought. They swarmed over barricades and over barbed wire and trampled everything to the ground. They reached, and climbed, and climbed on each other, and they didn’t shy from pain but allowed themselves to be crushed and then continued on, mindlessly, where other infected would have retreated. The whole mass of them seemed to have only one objective in mind: the priority of getting to whatever was hiding in the firelight at the top of that building and ripping it to shreds.

  Tomlin watched Paul and Junior’s pickup truck try to punch through the sea of bodies, layered two and three deep in some places, undulating and bulging like waves and swells. He’d caught the first part of Nate’s transmission before the noise of the hive had engulfed him. He could still hear it in his periphery, just an electronic noise, yammering against his eardrum, the quality of it the only thing that pierced the heart-freezing sound all around him. But despite Nate’s warning, Paul and Junior had tried to make it through. The pickup truck stopped like it had hit a brick wall. Tomlin watched the bodies in front of the grill compress, the faces painted white in bright headlights. Others climbed over the crushed ones, onto the hood, onto the car, blanketing it. Maybe Paul and Junior were screaming, but he couldn’t hear them.

  “Oh, man,” Tomlin said, his own voice just a small vibration in his head. “Oh… Jesus.”

  The pickup truck lifted, tilted, then toppled onto its side. A single headlight stabbed out into the gloom, illuminating a cone of writhing not-quite-humans that just kept going until the headlight could illuminate no further.

  When Tomlin felt the hospital tremble under his feet, his senses came back to him.

  He turned and ran to Jared. He grabbed the man by the shoulder, put his mouth next to the other man’s ear, and shouted to be heard: “Start shooting at them! Slow and steady!”

  They’d already been over the plan. Hang over the edge and take evenly spaced potshots. Doing damage wasn’t the concern. Keeping the infected’s attention was.

  Jared nodded, though his face was pale and sheened with a greasy-looking sweat. He ran, looking a little fumbly, to the edge of the roof and looked over. He froze there for a moment. Tomlin raised his own rifle and cracked a round off into the air. The gunshots were still loud enough to be heard, and it snapped the hypnosis of fear. Jared stuck his rifle over the edge and started firing.

  Tomlin ran for the roof access and the stairwell. He opened it and nearly cranked off another round when he saw the four faces lurching toward him. Then
he recognized Nate and Devon, and then Joey and Brandy coming in behind them.

  Tomlin coughed out the breath that had caught in his chest and simply pointed to the roof, to where Jared was keeping attention focused on him. Slow and deliberate fire. Maybe one shot every thirty seconds, or so they had planned. The foursome ejected themselves from the stairwell, back into the nightmare beyond. Tomlin slipped in and closed the door.

  It was anything but quiet in the stairwell, but it was quieter. Three levels below him, the sound of a dozen fists banging endlessly on the emergency exit doors echoed up at him. He hoped to God that the doors on the ground level held, or they were going to be really and truly screwed. There wasn’t enough ammunition or rifles in every bunker in this damned state that was going to save them if it came down to a fight.

  Tomlin keyed the Marine radio. “Smithfield to artillery, we got a whole mess of bad guys knocking on our doorstep right now. I hope you’re loaded up and ready.”

  Brinly paced the line of artillery pieces, the radio up to this head, followed by the younger Marine with the manpack strapped to his back. A larger and bulkier thing than he’d seen the Coordinators use, but that was to be expected. The Coordinators were Army, and Army always got the good shit. Marines got whatever cobbled together equipment they could scrape up and steal. It was not a point of contention, just a point of fact.

  His world was light and dark. The bright halogen beams from the trucks and worklights cast a whitewashed glow over everything, but they also cast black shadows, and beyond the reach of the lights, the world was dark and threatening.

  His left ear—the ear that he had held the radio handset to—rang with the brutal noise that had just come through it. Captain Tomlin was hailing from Smithfield, but the sound in the background made the hairs stand up across Brinly’s body, from his neck to his arms and down his back. A screeching, tremulous, roaring sound unlike any he had heard before, and yet he was immediately able to identify what it was, what he knew it had to be.

  That’s what a million infected sound like.

  “… I hope you’re loaded up and ready,” Tomlin was saying. “Y’all copy me?”

  Brinly waited a half beat and then transmitted. “We copy you, Tomlin. The guns are ready to rock. We’re just waiting for your signal. You got an ETA for your pickup?”

  “I’ll have it in a minute,” Tomlin said, his voice strained and distracted. Brinly could hear rifle shots in the background, very slow and deliberately paced. “I’m juggling two radios. Stand by.”

  “Roger. Standing by.” Brinly felt his heart kicking into gear. He stopped on his pace down the line of artillery pieces, hand still holding the radio handset. He raised his voice to be heard over the sound of the idling trucks. “Everyone get on your guns! Time is short and we got a city to level!”

  There was a loud crack, and then the radio handset was jerked out of his grip.

  He turned, half in annoyance, and saw the radioman jerking around on the ground, spitting blood and clutching a bloody hole in his neck.

  Someone shouted “Contact!” just before the air filled with the sound of rifle reports and bullets splitting the air.

  Brinly didn’t wait to figure out what was going on. He snatched up the Beretta M9 at his leg. All around them the dark woods twinkled with muzzle flashes. He could hear men crying out in pain and surprise and he knew that it was his own men. He started shooting his pistol at the muzzle flashes, stooping quickly down and grabbing ahold of the shoulder strap of his radioman’s rig, and then dragging his thrashing junior backward. He kept firing his pistol until the slide locked back.

  Brinly pulled the dying man behind the wheel of one of their trucks. “In the fucking trees!” he shouted out to his Marines as they dove for cover and tried to orient themselves to where the threat was coming from. But it was all around them. “Someone get on the fifties!”

  The words were barely out of his mouth before the one just over his head started thundering.

  The radioman was flailing, grasping at Brinly’s lapels, his eyes bulging out of his sockets as he struggled to get air past all the blood pouring into his lungs. His fingernails scratched at Brinly’s neck, just trying to grab something.

  Brinly put one hand on the Marine’s head and fended his grasping fingers away with the other. “I got you, buddy, I got you. You’re okay. You’re okay,” he said, though he knew that the man wasn’t. But he’d been here before. And he knew what a dying man wanted to hear. As he held the man down and spoke gently to him, he looked out and tried to get a better grasp of the situation.

  It wasn’t good.

  Brinly reeled the radio handset in by its cord and put it to his head. “Smithfield, Smithfield, we’re in fucking trouble out here! I don’t know what kind of help you can get us, but we’re gonna need it as soon as you can get it!”

  LaRouche kept himself pressed to the dirt behind a large hardwood tree. All around him the .50-caliber rounds from the Marine truck were chewing through wood and dirt and smashing through flesh, killing men before they could even cry out. He just lay in the dirt, wishing to be smaller, wishing to be flatter, and praying to a God that he still didn’t believe in that one of those rounds wasn’t going to find him and cave him in.

  Then, suddenly, the heavy machine gun fire was raking away from him.

  He took a big breath that stank of gunsmoke. Dirt and bits of bark and leaves peppered his tongue. He spat them out and then pulled his face out of the ground, wide-eyed and animalistic, flashing glances all around. In the darkness of the forest he could see very little, but the lights from the Marine trucks cast a silvery edge on everything and he could see faint outlines of his men, some of them moving from cover, others rolling around, injured.

  Another .50-caliber M2 was opening up from another one of the Marine trucks, and LaRouche realized that taking the Marines by surprise had been the easy part. The hard part was going to be carrying it through. He knew the type of men that he was surrounded by—the Followers were not a military force; they had little to no discipline and plenty of avenues of retreat. The Marines were disciplined, experienced, and their backs were to a wall. LaRouche knew without a doubt that if too many of his men died, the rest would run.

  LaRouche hiked himself onto one elbow, looking across a space of maybe ten feet to the next man that had crawled up behind a tree. “Concentrate on the machine guns! Get them when they’re turned away from us!” he shouted. “Pass it on!”

  The man ten feet away stared back like he didn’t quite understand.

  LaRouche growled a curse at him, and then propped himself up against the tree and sighted down the barrel of his rifle. He saw the blaring muzzle of the M2 swinging in his direction again.

  Shit.

  He pulled the trigger three times. His rounds sparked off the armored plating on the trucks, but something must have caught the gunner because the muzzle of the gun tipped up and spat flame at the sky. He felt relief, but mostly still the black feeling in his chest he was so familiar with, so hot that it was cold, terror and rage mixed together and bursting inside of him like a Molotov cocktail.

  He rolled out of cover and scrambled to his left, where most of the men had been killed by the last pass of machine gun fire. He needed to get a better angle on the other gunner. The fire was focused away from LaRouche’s position and the opportunity felt sudden and ripe. Kill him, fucking kill him.

  High-minded thoughts of countrymen and allegiances were far from him now. He didn’t care who he was shooting at, only that he needed to kill them. A predator’s mind-set wherein there was no stopping until someone was dead. Kill or be killed, men turned to beasts and fighting to the death. This was the place where LaRouche felt strangely natural, though afterward the thoughts would come and the realization of death would loom. Always after.

  He popped up behind a stump—rotted out and probably not worth much cover, but it was what he had. He strained to see past the glaring lights on the fronts of the Marine trucks, bu
t they dazzled his vision and he couldn’t see the second gunner. And now a third was opening up. He couldn’t see it, only hear it thundering on.

  A shape leaned out from behind the bumper of one of the trucks.

  LaRouche fired at it. It fired back, but the rounds went high. LaRouche was at an advantage: the man behind the bumper could not see LaRouche, but LaRouche could see him. At least the shape of him. The Marines were being forced to shoot at muzzle flashes in the night.

  LaRouche shot again and the shape jerked back behind the bumper. Maybe hit. Maybe not. LaRouche couldn’t be sure. He crawled quickly on all fours, changing his location. Constantly moving. You couldn’t just sit in one spot, no matter how comfortable it made you feel. You had to be where they didn’t know you were.

  Another tree. Large enough to stop rounds.

  LaRouche leaned out and sought the gunners again, but still couldn’t see anything past the lights. The fucking lights…

  I need to go the other way.

  The trucks were oriented so that their lights illuminated the workspace behind the artillery pieces. The pieces were pointed west, and LaRouche was in the southwest corner of the clearing. The best angle was going to be behind the trucks, where the lights would silhouette the Marines but not blind LaRouche and his men.

  Rounds splattered the tree branches above his head.

  He ducked momentarily, then began to run back the way he’d come, plunging a little deeper into the woods to avoid fire while he moved. The rounds seemed like they were chasing him, but he just ran faster. Branches lashed his face and tried to grab his legs and arms. He pushed through them and stumbled into a small ravine.

  It was crowded with bodies.

  LaRouche stood there, panting and looking around as the faces turned.