Zombie-dem

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 20

  The zombie that used to be Jace.

  The apartment complex was dark. And it stank too. What could they expect? The two brothers had taken point and were slowly trudging down the suspiciously damp corridor. It was hard to tell what color the carpet used to be. But much of it was stained with fresh blood. All of the doors were closed with no sign at all of any attempts to get inside, beside the odd scratches left in the woodwork of some of them. That meant there were at least one or maybe more Robots wandering around the halls. The silence was unsettling. None of them dared talk, but they wore their fears in their eyes and on their faces.

  That was, all apart from Jack. His whiskey must have hit a nice spot. Because he didn't seem to care in the slightest. Often people would say that they laughed in the face of danger. A lot of cops said it. It wound Jace up most of the time because he knew every word of it was bull. No one really believed it, and most people who said it, were themselves the most afraid and it was just some kind of macho overcompensation. But Jack? He really looked like he was enjoying himself. And that was in many ways more terrifying than the Robots walking as ghosts of the dead around this half destroyed city.

  Jace was fighting hard not to break down in a fit of sneezing and coughing. The whiskey he had taken was making some interesting effects on his mind. He really shouldn't have had it. It slowed his vision to a crawl whenever he turned his head from side to side. It took a few moments of looking in one place to be able to make out any detail. It might be the whiskey, or it might be the virus inside of him that was slowly killing him.

  All he could make out were splashes and blurs of red and grey. But he could still focus enough to make out green blotches and at least try to see the way that they moved. He needed to shake it off. He needed to just keep fighting the virus and get his work done.

  First they needed to plant some explosives. Preferably in the basement on something structural, just to make sure the blast would be enough to bring the whole building down. It seemed unfair. That Jace be charged with destroying part of the city he had tried so hard to defend and keep safe for all of his life.

  It was easier than it should have been to let go. Stopping to think about it all was just poisonous. His parents, his colleagues and all of his friends bar Lizzie, were without any doubt dead. Soon he would be too. So maybe that was why it was so easy to let go. To accept death.

  'The ones with scratches on?' Jace asked as quietly as he could, but it still looked as though it had annoyed Jack. 'Are those the ones we should check for people still alive?' He had a fair point. If the Robots were wandering the halls, then it would make sense that they would target the apartments where there were still humans alive and well. Jack would have looked half impressed if he gave a damn. He just ignored Jace and kept walking as softly as he could in the wake of the two remarkably professional brothers.

  'Hold on!' Jace even dared to raise his voice. 'We aren't helping anyone?' Jack put a finger to his lips and cast him a most stern glare. It was still hard to focus on anything at all, and alcohol had that way of covering up any fears or inhibitions, to the point that Jace just wanted to cry out blue murder. He was led to believe there would be at least a some sort of rescue component to this godless mission, and he wanted to try and save some people at least.

  'We need to rig this place to blow first.' Jack didn't bother to explain why. But it made sense. If they tried to mush people out of their safe little holes, they would resist, and that would in no end of doubt end up in an argument with every Robot in the place hammering down on them before they knew it. If they tried to rescue people after rigging it to blow then at least there was a motivation for them to get a move on.

  'Right.' Jace finally conceded, but caught Jack glancing at his forehead. He was suddenly made very aware of how profusely he had been sweating. The fever was setting in. The cold sweats, which the alcohol was trying so hard to cover, was a sure sign that he just didn't have too long left to give.

  Sid held up an arm to signal his rag tag team of desperate walking bombs to stop. They did, but only Jace made the mistake of kneeling down. Not like he had a choice under the weight of the virus that was pulling him slowly through his own ass. But his knee became immediately soaked in fresh blood. The Robots must have been virtually hemorrhaging, or they had eaten something and not left even so much as a trace in their wake.

  He had stopped at a door. A glance confirmed that it used to be a fire escape, but the light in the mantle above the door had long since died off. There had been a few buildings with only serviceable lights still working when they had emerged from the darkness of Central Park, but those had since died of exhaustion. If not for the slow but diligent encroachment of the dawn, they might not be able to see anything at all.

  He tried the handle to hear a pop and the lock slide open. He slowly slid it ajar, the bottom strip of steel pushing gently against the wet carpeted floors. Every sound became magnified ten fold. It was like that when you just needed everything to be silent, and you were paranoid if anything got in the way of it. The stairwell that the doorway revealed was long, dark, and led only downwards.

  'Okay.' Jack pushed his way to the front and addressed his bogus team of mercenaries come lost boys. 'Let's do this, but keep it quiet.' He whispered. 'The last thing we need is to get into a fire fight down there. We're boxed in, closed off, centuries away from backup, and there are no end to these... Robots...' he glanced at Jace, who would have admired the gesture and the humor in it if not for his miserable half life state, 'don't forget there are millions of people in this city. Every shot you fire draws more of them.'

  Speech and formalities over, he confidently strode down the hallway and waited in vain for the light to help his eyes. But he just couldn't adjust. None of them could. It was just too dark down there.

  'Night vision on.' He rummaged around in his pockets and brought out a pair of very fancy black goggles from his pocket. 'Here' He handed them to Jace, who looked like a kid who had found his dad's tool kit while trying to put them on and fasten the adjuster properly behind his head. Luckily, Jack had a spare set for himself.

  The night vision goggles cast the room in a cold and fuzzy green light. It was like looking at an old pixilated television again after years of seeing in high definition, but it was better than prodding around in the darkness not knowing what you might run into. It was easy to feel claustrophobic with them on. Knowing that he could see gave him some kind of relief, yet beyond those goggles it felt as though they were in total coffin like darkness. It was enough to cause the heart to skip and scream. The goggles closed off most of the peripheral vision and made the night feel like a scarily real video game.

  Jack took point from then on in. He wasn't the kind of leader to lead from the back, even though he was only really a leader by assumption alone. He hadn't said his rank, or even his real name for that matter. The long dark corridor led to a set of concrete steps, which presumably led to the bowels of the building. Each step was labored, and trying to stop breathing so loudly just made Jace hold his breath and need to gasp every once in a while.

  An open space followed. Roomed by a large generator and lift mechanism, but adorned with a great many concrete pillars and steel jousts. That was, in a way that seemed to defy all logic, very good news. It meant the building could be compromised structurally with enough of the explosives they were carrying. But they weren't, as predicted, alone.

  The odd Robot, five by his blurred and inconsistent count, wandered the room in a sad state of inactivity. Like they were looking for something. No dress style could be made out in the eerie light of the night vision goggles, but he could, even through the double blur of his goggles and his delayed alcohol impaired vision, make out the odd hard hat. He could swear, if his mind was useful enough to do so with any kind of certainty, that one of them was trying its damned hardest to push a mop around the floor.

  'Time to get to work.' Jack said and lowered his backpack. He pulled
Jace close without saying anything and tapped his goggles. It made the vision pop and stray in a heart wrenching moment of fear that he was to be left without any sight at all, but he just wanted him to focus completely. He took one of the hastily made bombs and pointed at some of the buttons. The third one in a row of three. Or was it four? He then slapped the plastic, clay like, explosive onto a nearby pillar and pressed another button. The opposite one, Jace was sure that time, and put his thumbs up to his team.

  'These,' He handed Jace three bombs, 'like that!' He pointed to the wall on which his makeshift bomb was stuck. Jace was feeling even more and more groggy with the passing seconds. But he grasped what he needed to do. The other men just got on with it as standard, but it was easy to be distracted by the stumbling Robots that they just had to try and avoid. The basement level must have been some kind of maintenance access point. The floor was cast in grey concrete, painted in parts in orange high visibility paint to indicate hazards and the like. The room was somewhat open but contained many tight twists and hidden nooks.

  The green pixilated glow of the night vision goggles just added to the boozy delay of his vision. His legs began to fail him and his stride became gaited. But he tried as hard as he could. His breathing was muffled by the muzzle on the goggles, and slowed by the hardness of his lungs. The urge to fall asleep started to take over, and his eyelids slowly became all the more heavy. The virus was working fast. His muscles began to spasticate and convulse in directions that he didn't know they could go, but his focus and drive kept him walking nonetheless.

  It was easy to lose track of the beats of his heart as he tried in vein to focus on the stumbling Robots. The space they found themselves in was cramped and tight, full of corners and cracks to hide in, but it made things all the more harder to navigate.

  There was one close. He could feel it, but not see it yet. The stumbling shuffle of a heavy boot and achingly long stride of a dragged foot gave it away. The light rasping groan on the end of its every breath echoed and bounced around the tight corners and hostile edges. He took a bomb and planted it on the first surface he could find. He didn't even care if it was anything structural or not, he just wanted to get back to surface and try and find a hole to die in.

  Another one on the steel post to his other side, and the beast revealed itself. He was boxed in. Jace, without even realizing it, had gone too far off track from the others. He was done for. His heart rattled to the point of strain on his ribs. The Robot stumbled closer to him, but Jace was frozen to the spot, half paralyzed by fear and half by the contortion of his muscles. The Robot wore the clothes of a fireman, but they hung lose over his white and grey blotchy skin. His helmet was askew upon his head. His boots tied only loosely around his feet.

  They normally worked up to a frenzy. They usually stumbled around in a half way house between life and death, until they found something that they might be able to eat. Then they became almost animalistic. Almost savage. But not this one. Jace did nothing, and watched by helplessly as it stumbled past him, brushing his clothes against Jace's frozen stiff limbs. The snarl of its rasping breath was sickening, with a dab of spittle landing on Jace's goggles as it passed.

  A surge of relief lifted through him as it turned the corner and stumbled in the opposite direction to his new found friends. But why did it just stumble through? Jace hardly wanted to think about it, but it was pretty clear. Because he was dead. Dead like them.

  He slapped another bomb on the side of the generator that looked to power the lift and pressed the buttons that Jack had shown him. That would have to do it. It was pretty much all he had to give. He just hoped that he could see Lizzie just one more time. He finally managed to find his way back to the rest of the team ,who looked to have been waiting for him for quite some time. That was good of them, he supposed. He might have forgiven them if they had just taken off.

  'You don't look so good.' Jack finally broke the awkward silence as they passed the stairwell and made it back to the apartments upstairs. 'In fact you look like...' Jace stopped him dead. He just told him to stop talking and stumbled to the head of the group. They were going to check all of the doors that might have people still alive behind them.

  'We need to get through this building as fast as we can.' Jack started talking them all through the plan as his pace quickened. 'We can't stick around for anyone that refuses to come, so we go in hard and fast, like we're breaching a stronghold on every apartment.' He was making sense. 'As soon as we start banging around up there, Robots are going to be right on top of us in seconds. Push hard to get to the roof, once we're there, we're done.' So they were going to have to go in fast and rattle around a lot to move any survivors into the open.

  Then they would have to count on the fire support team to put down the Robots and save as many people as possible. He needed to get on the radio.

  'Lizzie?' He managed a growl through the radio.

  'You don't sound so good.' What else could he have expected her to say?

  'You should see me...' It was remarkable how his humor could shine through. He had all but let go. But there were some things he just needed to say to her.

  'Don't say that...' Lizzie was obviously startled and upset.

  'You still in position?' Jace resorted to getting back to business rather than deal with the emotion filling up inside of him.

  'Yeah...' He could tell that there was something holding her back. Something that she wanted to say or something that she couldn't face.

  'All we're going to do is spark up a lot of noise and force people and Robots out into the open together. Are you up for this?'

  'Sure.' All he was getting was one word answers.

  'Listen, Liz, I don't think I'm going to make it.' It must have been the last drabs of the alcohol in his system giving him the confidence to just come out and say it.

  '... But...' He could hear her start to sob and it set him going too. The guys must have thought he was soft or something, at least that's what was running through his mind, but they didn't. They would be upset too had they been staring death down the barrel too.

  'It must have been all of the blood, from that Robot...' Jace battled through his words.

  'I don't think I can do this without you.' Lizzie could hardly breathe through her sadness but tried nonetheless.

  'Did you think we were always going to be partners.' He played the safe card.

  '...Maybe more.' She whimpered. It wasn't the time to leave things unsaid. He thought for a moment. He thought of telling her everything, that he really did love her, had even grown to love her more as time went on. That she was his best friend and he had been trying so hard to find a way to say those things to her from the very second they had met.

  But it wasn't him. He had a job to do. He needed to focus on it. For the very reason he had called the monsters Robots, he didn't say anything of the sort to her. He needed to rob the situation of its power, of its reality, to lessen the impact of the horrible world they had woken up to. So he didn't.

  'I know... just help me do a last good thing.'