A redheaded woman in her early thirties spoke up next. “Those things took my husband when the convoy was attacked. I say we kill as many of those little pieces of shit as we can.”
Corrie, who’d been serving as the group’s main cook, pushed herself to her feet; she was in her forties, overweight, and she had a horrible complexion. “You point me at ‘em, honey, and I’ll blow the bastards to pulp,” she said, pumping a round into the chamber of the 12-gauge she carried.
“Are we all in agreement then?” Michelle challenged them, slinging her rifle onto her shoulder so that it pointed at the ceiling. A chorus of approval echoed in the mess hall as Kyle entered behind Michelle.
“Rallying the troops, I see,” he said, laughing.
Michelle spun around, taking a swing at his face. He caught her by the wrist and twisted her in front of him, pinning her arm against her own back.
“That’s cute. It really is.” Kyle gave her a kiss on the cheek as she broke his hold and bolted from him. “Whoa, beautiful. We don’t have to die today. There is another way out of the compound without going through the bulk of the rats.”
“What?” Michelle asked, struggling to keep her anger in check.
“The rat,” Kyle said, “the one that got in alone. It used the back door. There’s an old part of the base that doesn’t show on the scanners. It isn’t part of the base proper, so to speak. It was part of the original bomb shelter built on this spot before your government remodeled this place into a high-tech death factory.”
Darren was stunned. “If that’s true, why didn’t you tell us about it before?”
“Didn’t know about it myself until a few minutes ago. I know this place went on beyond the steel walls we called the base, but I didn’t know they were still accessible until I saw a demon just appear on the bio-scanners as I was running for my life. Since as far as I know they can’t walk through rock, I figure it came from a tunnel in the old base and ripped its way into this one.”
“What does all that mean?” Paul asked, trying to keep up.
“It means if we can take out a single demon and maybe a much smaller force of the rats and the dead than the one up top, we can get the hell out of here and have a shot at staying alive.”
“Where’s the tunnel?” someone called out.
Kyle kept his eyes on Michelle. “It’s in the emergency stairwell between this level and the one above it, only on the other side of the complex. If we’re lucky, the rats will spread their numbers thin on the level above us, thinking some of us are hiding on that floor. We’ll hopefully have even less of them to fight through.”
“Michelle,” Darren said, “could we really do what he’s saying?”
“Maybe. If we had more weapons.”
“We don’t and we’re wasting time,” Kyle spat. “I can’t do this on my own, or I’d be gone already. We go now with what we have, or we die here without question. It’s as simple as that.”
Paul motioned for Michelle to go. “Get going. I can’t do what he’s asking, or I’d go myself.” He thumped his chest. “Heart condition. I wouldn’t survive the running.”
Corrie moved to stand beside him. “I’m staying too.” She gestured to a group of people keeping to themselves at the rear of the mess hall. “Most of us would stay and hope the rats pass us by or overlook us. Some of us are too scared to go out there if there’s the slightest chance we’ll be safe where we are. Take who you can and go. If the rats do find us, we’ll buy you some time.”
Michelle was shocked by Corrie’s offer and the bulk of the group’s refusal to go. She didn’t know what to do. These folk were her responsibility.
Benji stood up, sniffing and wiping at his cheeks. “You go on, sis. I’ll look after them. Mike and Warren both would’ve wanted someone to survive.”
“Benji…” she started in a quivering voice, but he grabbed her and shoved her at Kyle.
“Get the hell out of here, sis, before I kick your ass for once.”
Kyle winked at Benji. “Thanks,” he said as he darted for the door. Darren, Brook, and a redheaded woman named Anne raced after him. Michelle hesitated long enough to hug Benji and give him a peck on the nose, and then she followed Kyle’s group.
The others watched them go, then closed the mess hall doors and started barricading them with tables, chairs, and whatever else they could find inside the room.
Six
“This way!” Kyle led his small band of escapees around a bend in the corridor. They ran, making it across the lower level to the stairwell door without any unwelcome encounters. They stopped at the entryway. They could hear the shuffling feet of the dead above them on the other side.
“What the fuck?” Darren whispered to Kyle. “Shouldn’t they be pouring in here already?”
Kyle smiled darkly, as if he knew something the others didn’t. “Never question a good thing,” he said, then he swung the door open before anyone could move. Two corpses turned to face them, totally taken off-guard. Kyle dispatched them both with his pistols, then dove up the stairs.
“Shit!” Michelle leapt after him, trying to cover him as best she could with her rifle.
#
Minutes before Kyle entered the stairwell, the head Rat King had stood at the hole he and his three brothers had torn through the base’s metal wall, communing with his children deeper in the base. His instincts had told him to head to the lowest level, but his children had found a trail of blood on the floor they were currently on. He could feel their joy as they tasted it. It led them to a series of doors that appeared to have been left open just for them. The trail ended in a great red pool at the second stairwell leading down.
The fastest of his children detected noises and smells behind the door, and they informed him that there were humans hiding down there, preparing to face them. This is the place where we’ll feast, the rats told him.
Sympathetic to his children’s eager pleas, the Rat King dispatched them and his brothers to enjoy their prize. He kept a contingent of the dead with him, however, totaling nearly three dozen in number. He was relishing the taste of flesh via his children’s senses when the sound of gunshots below snapped his psychic link. He half-howled, half-screeched as the flavors faded from his mouth, then, snarling, he moved to deal with the man who’d taken such pleasure from him.
#
As Kyle reached the second level, he skidded to a halt, staring straight into the face of the largest rat demon he’d ever encountered. It looked pissed off, and it threw itself at him. Kyle barely avoided its claws by hurling himself over the stairway’s railing. He toppled over the side, grabbing the base of the rails so fast and so hard the impact broke one of his fingers. He screamed but didn’t let go.
The Rat King moved towards him like a cat playing with its victim as Michelle reached the second level with Darren and Brook at her side. Brook blasted the creature with her shotgun, and the scattershot tore tiny holes across its skin.
Michelle’s rifle clicked empty as she jerked the trigger back. She cursed, tossing it aside.
Moving in front of her, Darren fired a trio of rounds from his .45 into the monster as it spun to face them.
#
After Michelle left, the people in the mess hall barely had time to barricade the double doors before they heard noises in the corridor outside. Something struck the doors so hard the whole barricade shook, and Benji watched in horror as monsters slowly pushed their way in. Chairs and tables clattered to the floor as the doors swung inward.
“Fire!” Paul roared.
Rats streamed through the debris of the barricade, but the two massive demons held everyone’s attention.
Benji was closest to the entrance, and, unleashing a battle cry his sister would have been proud of, he ran straight at the lead demon, firing his 9mm over and over into its chest. The demon grimaced and snarled in pain, but kept walking and swatted Benji across the room with a wave of its hand; he struck the far wall and landed in a mass of broken bones, and as t
he darkness took him, his last thoughts were of Michelle.
People screamed all around the room, some dying at the hands of the demons, others falling under a whirlwind of hungry rodents. Soon, only Corrie and Paul were left alive.
They fought their way into a corner of the room and kept shooting. Paul was pale and sweating, barely standing as he ripped a rat off his arm where it wiggled, gnawing deeply into his biceps. Corrie was covered head to toe with small bleeding bite marks. She took aim and blew half a dozen rats to pieces with a well-placed blast from her shotgun.
Paul’s eyes rolled up in his head as he cried out in pain and collapsed. The rats covered him almost instantly.
“Oh God, please,” Corrie wept, flinging a rat from her hair and bringing her shotgun up to face the demon walking towards her.
“God is dead,” it said in broken English. “This land is ours now.”
The small rats backed off as the thing leaned in to lick the blood off Corrie’s face with its long black tongue. Its breath stank of death and decay.
Corrie’s shotgun fell from her trembling hands as the rat demon placed a claw between her legs. Her eyes bulged as its finger poked inside of her through her clothes. The creature mimicked a human smile as best it could and jerked upwards, gutting her from groin to neck before she even had time to scream.
#
The Rat King laughed as it lifted Darren with a single hand and threw him against the stairwell wall so hard the sound of breaking bones echoed above the chaos of the battle.
Realizing the scattershot in her weapon was useless against the monster, Brook took advantage of the distraction and slipped past the beast into the hole that led to the tunnels beyond, leaving Michelle and Kyle on the stairs. A dead man dressed in a blood-covered police uniform stumbled toward her. Brook shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the corpse’s mouth and blew the man to hell.
Back in the stairwell, Michelle drew her sidearm as Kyle struggled to climb over the railing back onto the platform. Anne knocked Michelle aside and let loose on full auto, her AK-47 chattering, spraying a stream of bullets into the Rat King’s stomach at pointblank range. The monster retreated, leaving a pool of blood where it had stood.
Kyle swung himself onto the platform, cradling his broken hand in pain. “Don’t let up!” he yelled. “Kill the damn thing!”
The Rat King lashed out at Anne with a long arm, and her head disappeared from sight as it bounced down the stairs.
“No!” Michelle screamed and launched herself at the monster. It gawked in surprise as she crashed into it and sent it careening over the side of the stairs. Even before its body had crashed into the floor below, Kyle was dragging Michelle toward the hole in the wall. “Run!”
As he darted into the tunnel and saw Brook sprinting down the passageway into the distance, he dropped a time-delayed grenade onto the ground behind him. He ran on at full speed, dragging Michelle by the hand until the force of the blast hit them and sent them rolling into the dirt. When the dust cleared, they saw that the hole into the stairwell had collapsed, but they could hear the Rat King clawing at the pile of debris that separated them. Kyle got up and yanked Michelle to her feet.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“We keep running.” Kyle smiled and sprinted after Brook.
Epilogue
Kyle sat at his desk. The world had ended but the paperwork went on. His superiors wanted a full report on his trip to America.
He sighed and got up, letting the work wait. He poured himself a glass of wine from the office’s bar and looked out his window into the streets of London. War raged between the military and the dead, but Britain was holding. A tank made its way down the street, surrounded by a squad of heavily armed men in black, and he watched absentmindedly, reaching up to trace the scar on his cheek that Michelle had given him. He regretted that he’d been forced to put a bullet in her skull when she’d learned of the steps he’d taken to ensure their escape from the base. He’d longed to feel her wet lips around him at least once, but Brook’s lean, tan body had charms of its own, and Brook, unlike Michelle, had been able to grasp that sometimes sacrifices needed to be made for the greater good.
And she was grateful, very grateful in fact, to have a roof over her head and a warm bed to sleep in. He smirked. His job did have its perks.
He returned to his desk and picked up his pen. He’d stood face to face with the new ruler of America and had seen him badly wounded. The demons could be hurt. They weren’t immortal like the legends had hinted at. They bled and could be taken out like any mortal foe.
There was hope in the world as long as Britain stood, and when it finished securing its borders and rose up from the ashes of the dead, it would be men like Kyle who would show the evil unleashed upon the earth that mankind could fight dirty too.
Copyright
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2009 Eric S. Brown
www.PermutedPress.com
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Season of Rot Page 24