by Sawyer, JT
Running up the stairs, Carlie lowered one weapon and reached up to her ear-mic to contact the downtown headquarters. “Alpha One, do you copy? This is Team Two.”
“Go ahead, Team Two.”
“We are on foot, inbound for the package. Team Leader and four other agents are KIA. Primary evac route has been comprised. Request immediate evac on roof, over.”
“Copy that. ETA to your position is ten minutes, over.”
“Copy, Team Leader Two out.”
As they crested the landing to the third floor two creatures lept over the stairs. Carlie shot one in mid-air, ripping into its head with a volley of bullets, while the other slammed into the bald-headed man behind her, tearing at his face like a feral dog. Carlie deftly kicked the creature in the head long enough to dispatch it with her MP-7.
“Holy shit, what are these things?” said Phillip, standing over the mangled body of the former agent. “They look like people, but how can they move so fast?”
She glanced over at Phillip, whose eyes were racing along the stairway walls above. Carlie forced herself to swallow while feeling her dry mouth constrict.
“Looks like we’re it,” bleated Phillip, whose face was pale and clammy as he looked down at the dead agent. He started to sway like he was going to faint, then leaned against the wall.
Carlie’s eyebrows were scrunched together, her gaze focused down below on the lobby. My God, how can Gerald and the others be dead? He was the best of us and now our elite group has been wiped out in minutes. Gerald can’t be gone. She had seen dead bodies before but not one of her closest friends. She felt guilt at not having gone down fighting alongside her colleagues, but also inside her was an animalistic rage. She wanted to shuck off the steely exterior that had been drilled into her and slaughter all of those creatures down below. The civilized part of her mind winced, and she forced herself to take several deep breaths.
Carlie had trained for such high-adrenaline moments for years, but nothing of this magnitude. She felt her stomach tighten up in coils and the blood rush from her face, wondering if her training was going to be enough. She swung her body away and forced herself past the dead agent, stepping over the blood-smeared steps. A single line of sweat rolled down her temple, stinging her eye as she forced away the image of the deceased agents below.
“What…what do we do now? We should get out of here before more of those things come,” said Phillip, who was clutching the metal handrail.
As she peered up the expanse of stairs above, she could hear the clamor of movement in the lobby below. She removed a tear-gas canister from her vest, popping the pin with her trembling fingers, and dropping the device down through the middle opening in the stairs. “We’re here to extract Gemini. Hopefully this will slow those things down.” She bent over and grabbed two rifles off the dead agent and thrust them into Phillip’s chest. “Here—I hope you don’t need a refresher course because I don’t have the time.”
“It’s been a while but the old skills should still be there,” he said with a gulp.
Emerging on the last step to the fourth floor, Carlie paused on the landing and peered into the window. She saw two dismembered bodies lying on the green-tiled floor but didn’t hear any movement in the corridor.
“This was the last contact we had with Gemini’s detail. We’ll start with room 48 and work back from there,” she whispered to Phillip.
Using hand signals, she motioned to him to open the door while she swiftly entered the hallway, swinging the MP-7s to her right while he covered the left.
Chapter 10
Carlie and Phillip moved side by side down the hallway, stepping over three mangled Secret Service agents as well as numerous college students, all of whom had bite marks on their necks but also bullet wounds to the head. She could see the numerous spent magazines and shell casings littering the floor. This attack was swift and unpredictable. These things must have overrun the others before they could get away. Carlie knelt down beside the bodies to check if any of them were the president’s daughter, then she moved down the hall in a low squat.
Phillip motioned down the hallway, keeping his weapon fixed ahead. “A pile of spent shell casings by the last door on the right,” he said.
“That’s room 48,” whispered Carlie, who moved forward, positioning herself to the right of the door. She remained hunched and moved up to the rectangular window on the lab door, noticing the blood on the silver handle. Peering inside, she saw the room contained overturned chairs, a shattered wooden table, and six more bullet-ridden corpses.
She nodded to Phillip as they prepared to do a dynamic room entry, something that she had performed hundreds of times in their bi-monthly training events. Carlie flung the door open and entered to her right while Phillip inserted himself to the left.
“There in the corner,” he said, motioning past a table to a cabinet. “The other agents are all down.”
“Shit,” Carlie said, moving up to look at her fallen colleagues until she stood over the body of the last man. “Daniels here must have killed the attackers before dying from his wounds.”
“But where the hell’s the girl?” Phillip said, scanning the room. “She must be dead too. We should get out of here, Carlie—before it’s too late.”
“We’re not going until we have located Gemini. Get any extra mags off the bodies,” Carlie said.
Phillip was staring at the mangled figure beneath him, his eyes unblinking.
“Phillip—did you hear me?”
“Copy that,” he stuttered.
“Remember your previous training and we will get through this,” Carlie said, as if Gerald were right behind her saying those same words to her. “Right now, we’ve got to locate the girl. The helo will be here any time.”
As Carlie stood up, she heard movement coming from behind a cabinet near the corner. They both rushed forward, sliding the ceiling-high unit aside. Behind it was a large wall vent. Carlie knelt down while lowering one of her weapons and removing a flashlight from her vest.
“Gemini, are you there?”
“Carlie—is that you? What’s happening?” said a young woman’s voice from the dark confines of the ventilation shaft.
Carlie yanked the mesh screen off and shone her light down the square galvanized shaft.
“There’ll be time to figure that out later. Right now, we need to get you to the roof. There’s a helicopter on the way.”
She extended her hand and saw slender, tan fingers reach out for hers as a terrified woman emerged. Eliza’s black corkscrew hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her lab coat bore red splotches.
“Eliza, are you OK—are you injured?”
“I think I’m alright,” she whispered through trembling lips.
As Carlie looked the young woman over for any signs of trauma, she saw the shadow of another figure emerging from the ventilation shaft. An older man with a slender gray beard and bent wire-rimmed glasses was struggling to climb out of the narrow passage.
Phillip had his weapon trained on the figure as Eliza moved to help the man out. “It’s alright. This is Professor Alan Beauchard. I’m his lab assistant and was working here with him when we heard all the screaming outside.”
“Anyone else jammed in there we should know about?” said Phillip.
“That’s it. We were the only ones to make it. The other agents were all bitten but killed the attackers in the hallway. After Daniels shoved us in the ventilation shaft we heard more gunfire and then it was silent until you arrived. Where are the other agents now?”
Carlie stepped aside, letting Eliza see the dead figures splayed on the floor behind her. “We’re it and we need to get to the roof now.”
“Oh my God—how can they all be dead? Dear Lord, this can’t be happening,” she said, clasping her hands over her mouth and hunching over.
Carlie grabbed Eliza’s arm, yanking the sobbing woman and pulling her towards the entrance.
“Move, before more of those things come this
way.”
Carlie tapped her ear-mic. “Alpha One, this is Team Two, we are headed to the extraction point, over.” As they moved past the bodies and over broken glass, she heard the pilot screaming in pain and then static ensued. She repeated the call but got no reply.
She repeated the message two more times but to no avail. “The helo must have been comprised. Time for Plan B.”
“What is Plan B, young lady?” said the nervous professor, whose hands were shaking.
“Plan B is head to the roof and wait for another airborne assault team, as going down below is not an option.”
As they entered the hallway, Carlie led them back to the stairwell and slowly pushed open the heavy steel door. She covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve in case any wisps of tear gas had floated up from the lobby, but all she saw was the gray plume below cloaking the final resting place of her friends. A subtle lilt of breeze in the lobby was swirling grit and airborne glitter upward, and she could hear the sound of footsteps coming from below. She motioned everyone to enter the stairwell and begin moving up to the roof. As she did, she peered over the edge of the handrail and could see a harried group of blood-soaked, infected humans, including two former agents, leaping up the stairs towards them.
Chapter 11
Carlie looked up at the door to the roof and then back down the hallway to her right beside the open door. “This way; we’re going to Plan C, D, and E until we are out of here.”
As they ran to the elevator, Carlie yelled back to Phillip, “Secure the door with the fire hose on the opposite wall. I have to pry open the elevator so we can climb down.”
“You got it,” he said, slinging his weapons and smashing out the glass on the wall compartment. Then he unraveled the thick canvas hose and pulled it across the floor, attaching it to the door handle on the stairs with a series of half-hitches. By the time he was finished, a dozen creatures were pawing at the narrow window and slamming their contorted bodies against the thick metal.
Carlie stood in the middle of the elevator and began prying the silver doors apart. “Get down here, both of you, and help me. This is too heavy to do alone.”
Eliza and the professor lent their hands until the doors were peeled back eighteen inches. “Phillip, can you find something to jam in between the doors?” she shouted under heavy breathing.
He kicked open a door to a nearby office and quickly returned with a metal chair. Once it was wedged inside, Carlie removed her grip and pulled out her flashlight, aiming its beam into the shaft below.
“We’re going down there—are you kidding me?” said Eliza.
“Unless you want to stay here and be ripped apart by those piranhas, you’re going to follow Phillip down the service ladder. Once we’re all inside, I’ll release the door. That should buy us some time.”
“What about you, Carlie?” said Eliza, whose face was still pale.
“I’ll be right on your heels after I slow these things down.”
They could hear the metal door of the stairwell being yanked violently, followed by the sound of the small glass window shattering. Raw, yellow hands pawed through the opening, attempting to scrabble their way through.
“Down the ladder you all go,” snapped Carlie as she ran forward to procure the remaining weapons off the dead agents on the floor. She ran back to the elevator shaft while Phillip led the others down the dark passage. Carlie laid three rifles from the fallen agents on the ground and then readied her own MP-7s. She steadied the barrels on the now-rickety stairwell door.
As the fire hose gave way from its wall mount, the door broke away from its shattered hinges. Creatures began flooding through the entrance. Carlie unleashed a volley of fire from both weapons, spraying the mass with head and neck shots as best as the fully automatic weapons allowed. Seven of them went down in the first volley but were quickly replaced by a dozen more ravenous ghouls. Again, she fired repeatedly, dropping more creatures until both weapons were dry, then grabbed the replacements off the floor and continued the deafening spray of bullets, clenching her jaw with the release of each hail of gunfire.
A shroud of gunsmoke roiled into the corridor before her, eventually coalescing into a veil of red mist where the bullets impacted the unending wave of attackers. The entrance and hallway grew choked with bodies but more creatures struggled to climb over the mangled carcasses. Carlie kept waiting for the carnage to end but the flood of creatures didn’t diminish. She finished another surge of firepower and tossed the smoking rifles down while grabbing the last MP-7.
Eight more creatures had entered the hall, slipping on the wine-colored floor full of skull fragments, which gave her a few critical moments to finish them off. The last one that collapsed at her feet was a hulking brute with shovel-like hands. Like the others, its skin was jaundiced and its cheeks were sagging rolls of flesh, like the ripples on a beach.
With her MP-7 nearly depleted, and with no end in sight of the monstrous horde, she slung the weapon and retreated back to the elevator shaft. She lowered herself down, grabbing the cold metal rungs with her trembling hands. She removed her pistol and used the butt to slam the desk chair out of the way as the doors slid closed and darkness ensued. As she descended she heard clawing and muffled shrieks at the elevator doors until the sound grew faint with the approach of the lower floor.
Stepping off the ladder, she heard the fluty voice of Phillip, who was standing in the shadow of his flashlight beside the others. “What do we do now? Those things are just going to keep coming—they won’t stop.”
“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks,” said Carlie, trying to calm the tremors in her upper body.
Carlie aimed her flashlight into the corner of the cramped space. “There’s a service door here that may lead to another corridor.” She motioned to Eliza to help her open it and then she climbed through the square enclosure.
“Looks like it’s navigable. It’s a straight passage that goes on for at least 300 meters,” Carlie said, pulling her head back inside. Carlie’s mind snapped back to the ghastly creatures she had dispatched. What’s happening in the world? The briefing earlier said the attacks started last night back in the Southeast…and now…now this has swept across the country. What could’ve caused this?
She blew a strand of hair off her nose and leaned against the wall of cables while placing a fresh magazine in her rifle. Carlie refocused her thoughts on the passage ahead. It was all that mattered right now. As thoughts of an imminent rescue slipped away from her, she gulped in a breath of musty air and pushed forward, leading the others through the narrow corridor.
Chapter 12
When nightfall came, Jared found the streets of downtown Tucson to be relatively quiet if one could shut out the distant gnawing of flesh a few hundred yards to his right, where four creatures were feasting on a decapitated mailman. He studied them, noting their lemony faces, which bore heavy wrinkles and reminded him of armadillos.
The street lights were flickering above, illuminating the sidewalk outside the Crown-Vic where he had hidden for the afternoon. The vehicle had been left running earlier when the marshal exited, and the air-conditioning was still cooling the interior despite the slightly ajar front door. Jared mulled over how much fuel was left and if he should try to drive away from the scene of horror or try to duck into one of the nearby university buildings three block away. The campus area seemed to have suffered less destruction than the burnt-out shops and restaurants lining the downtown corridor, and he could see a few lights on in the upper floors of some of the nearby structures.
Most of the late afternoon in his cramped hideout had been spent trying to silently open the car door and attempt to search for the handcuff keys that he hoped were still attached to the shredded corpse of the marshal outside. He had managed to locate the blood-encrusted Glock in the man’s severed hand but the keys were not to be found. It had taken hours just to extract the pistol, as he had to constantly halt his efforts and duck out of sight beneath the tinted windows of the Crown
-Vic whenever frantic survivors ran past in their futile attempt to escape the growing crowds of other-worldly attackers.
If I can just get those keys and my trusty daypack out of the trunk, life will be relatively peachy, he thought as the faint odor of dried flesh from the pavement pierced his nostrils. No way I can stay here in this damaged rig, despite the nice leather seats. He raised his head slowly above the bars, looking past the dead marshal on the passenger’s side and out at the four figures on the sidewalk by an overturned ice-cream cart. Jared panned his head around the city block in search of other survivors but only saw body parts, abandoned vehicles, and darkened buildings. Again, he noted the campus structure two blocks away, which had a single light on in the lobby.
Hmm…that place seems like my best bet and may offer the hope of other survivors…strength in numbers and all that. But I need a distraction if I’m gonna have a chance of even making it there on foot. He looked around at the street ahead and back at the body of the marshal. Then he mulled over his options and finally raised his eyebrows in wonder.
“Hell, yeah, Jared—you are a genius, a Confederate Einstein,” he whispered, while a slight frown crept out from the corner of his mouth. Jared looked down at his shaking hands with a look of surprise. He had always been the cool-handed thief with unruffled nerves but now he was trembling in fear like he was a newbie working his first heist.
Jared took a deep breath and tried to drive away the horrific images on the street from his mind. He refocused on his escape plan and ran through it like he was rehearsing for a house robbery, visualizing his actions and contingencies. When he was confident of his scheme, Jared raised his head and scanned the surrounding streets one more time. “If all else fails, I’m gonna take a bunch of those cantaloupe heads with me,” he whispered while palming the Glock.