“No one does,” Goto replies, now somewhat unsure of the statement he just made. “And our Mirage cloaking device is still on, so they shouldn’t even be seeing the compound.”
“But they totally look like they’re coming this way,” Brodie adds. “This doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”
Goto nudges Allison aside and takes control of the telescope, surveying the growing group of natives congregating in the distance. He notices a few additional details as the horde draws nearer; they have dogs with them, possibly dingoes; and they’re all armed with various weapons: spears, boomerangs and bolos. Some are even clutching large rocks.
Then, without a word, he turns on his heels and is out of the office once more, pausing only briefly to pick up a rifle-scope from an equipment case as he makes his way to the front of the building. He rushes out to the front ‘porch’ brining the scope up to his eye. Far more effective than the old telescope, it allows much greater magnification and auto-focus to dim the bright sunlight and bring the objects in the distance into clear view.
And then he sees it: their faces.
Their empty, vacant stares. He notices the skin, teeth, and limbs missing from their decaying bodies.
Whoever, or whatever these things are, they’re not alive.
Chapter Eighteen – Sensou
Western Australia | January 28, 2012 | 11:26 am, Western Standard Time
The smell arrives before the horde. The stench of rotting flesh blows downwind from nearly half a mile away, stinging Goto’s eyes and burning his nostrils.
As they approach the features of the dead become increasingly clear. The tribesmen are in various states of decay; some so fresh that their entire faces are intact, missing only some muscle tissue around their fingers and protruding ribcages. Others have lost arms, eyes, and entire jaws; the sagging flesh dripping from their bones, leaving a sopping trail of decomposed skin to bake in the unimaginable heat.
The dingoes are rotting in equal measure, and approach at various speeds. Some of the putrid three-legged canines are doing their best to limp forward and keep pace with the pack, while the newly deceased are nearly indistinguishable from a live dog. A few are moving with frightening agility.
“Holy shit,” Brodie whispers, staring dumbfounded. “How many of those things are there?”
“More than a hundred at a rough count, and I’ve counted twenty or so dingoes,” Goto replies, still peering through his binoculars. “And I can see more approaching behind them.”
“Does everyone know how to fire a gun?” Goto asks, stepping back inside the front door. Everyone replies with a tentative nod. Of course Jens and Brodie have never fired an actual gun, but they’ve played enough gun shooting simulations and video games that they figure it can’t be that much tougher to fire a real one.
Allison starts to speak but Goto holds out his finger. “I wasn’t asking you.” He moves to a cabinet against the wall and presses his palm into a metal plate. The cabinet shifts aside and hidden metal doors slide open, revealing a small but impressive arsenal; AK-47s, Uzis, grenades, rifles, handguns, and an assortment of knives. He distributes the weapons to Jens and Brodie, along with additional ammunition. He calls his remaining security staff, which at the moment amounts to only three additional men. They join the group and arm themselves, strapping machine guns over their shoulders and clip grenades to their belts. They’re preparing for war, but they’re not sure what they’ll be going to war against.
Jens slaps a magazine into his machine gun and releases the safety latch. “We should call Cole and Paige for back-up. How long until they get back from Tibet if they leave now?”
Goto shakes his head. “Even traveling at the jet’s top speed it could take ninety minutes. Our guests will be here in fifteen, and the fight won’t last longer than ten...regardless of who wins.”
The group spreads themselves out over the compound, preparing for the onslaught.
***
A pair of black eyed, snarling dingoes arrive first. Leaping from a full sprint, Goto cuts them down with a hail of machinegun fire, enough bullets to tear them in half. They continue to crawl forward as Jens pumps additional rounds into their carcases, allowing Goto a moment to reload.
By the time they stop moving Jens has emptied his thirty-round clip as well, and he looks up at Goto in disbelief. “How many bullets do you have left in that secret weapon closet of yours?”
Goto glances at the rapidly approaching intruders. “Not enough, I’m afraid.”
Brodie opens fire with a long-range rifle from the second-storey office window, sniping tribesmen with surprising accuracy. His shots land in the head and chest, but even direct hits aren’t slowing their forward momentum; the bullets sail harmlessly in one side of their bodies and out the other. One bullet enters through a corpse’s eye and explodes out the back of his head, spattering the surrounding bodies with bone fragments and oily black liquid. Unfazed, it continues to amble towards the compound missing most of its face.
When the majority of the horde moves to within throwing distance the security force begins to lob grenades, blowing dozens of them to pieces. While a few are disabled, many of the dead continue to approach. Some are even dragging their legless bodies forward as they claw their fingers into the dirt.
“This isn’t working!” One of the security guards shouts, barely audible over the deafening sound of gunfire. “They don’t feel any pain!”
“Welcome to five minutes ago!” Jens responds, continuing to unload one clip after another.
They’re closing in, less than thirty feet away.
Allison runs back and forth from the living room to the porch, shuttling new clips from the nearby weapons closet to the group as they continue to open fire.
After a few minutes the front of the compound is littered with dismembered bodies, many still twitching and attempting to continue their attack. The fresher corpses trample the disabled ones, oblivious to their presence.
Ten feet away. The dead are close enough to taste.
Brodie sprints down the spiral staircase and joins the team out front, scooping up a machine gun on the way. He adds to the hailstorm of lead that’s slicing through the legions of undead. Chunks of bone and sinew tear from the incoming wall of bodies, but few are falling. Not a single one has completely stopped moving.
Having delivered the last of the ammunition, Allison stands helplessly behind the firing squad, clutching her tennis racket tightly to her chest. She wants to start smashing tennis balls, hoping they catch fire and turn into fiery meteors, but she can’t summon the strength. She’s paralyzed with fear.
“I’m out!” One of the guards shouts, discarding his empty handgun. He draws a long Bowie knife from a sheath and prepares to start slicing.
Jens fires his final bullet and drops his weapon as well, followed by Goto and Brodie.
“Looks like this is show time.” Brodie taps the security code into his gauntlet and his eyes flare with red energy, causing his eyelids overflow with thick black smoke. He extends his hands and launches twenty of the attackers through the air, blowing them backward as if they were caught in a violent tornado. They bounce and roll along the unforgiving desert floor, and their brittle bones snap from the impact. Within a moment they regain their footing and continue to march forward as if nothing had happened.
Goto extends his hand in front of him and attempts to use his telekinesis, rotating his fingers slowly while he focuses every ounce of his intention. Nothing happens. Dead neurons apparently can’t be manipulated, and he quickly realizes that his powers are useless.
The horde has reached the porch and there’s nowhere to go. The sheer volume of bodies is overwhelming, approaching shoulder-to-shoulder like a single moaning, undulating mass of rotting flesh.
Jens is blindsided by a leaping dingo; a skeletal creature missing half its teeth. It gnaws at his leg, tearing at the meat of his calf. Jens lets out a short scream but quickly draws a knife from his belt, stabbing the dog
repeatedly in the snout. He continues to hack away until the animal doesn’t have enough of a jaw left to maintain a grip.
A mostly intact tribesman throws a spear and Goto leans back to dodge it, but the distraction allows two more attackers to drag him to the ground. They claw at his face but he gamely fights back, kicking them away with both feet.
Allison trembles as the battle rages all around her, and the dead approach from every side of the compound. Their jeep is overturned and badly damaged. She can hear the sound of glass shattering at the back of the house, and rocks flying through the windows from all angles.
No weapons, no vehicles, and nowhere to hide. “This is it,” Allison whispers to herself. “This is how I’m going to die.”
Chapter Nineteen – Incredulous
North-Western Tibet | January 28, 2012 | 10:58 am, China Standard Time
“Open the door,” Cole shouts at the intercom.
“Are you insane?” the pilot replies, his voice cracking as the Aithon takes another missile to the side of its fuselage.
“Probably, but we’re out of options. Take us closer to the mountains, and slow down as much as you can.” He turns to Paige. “Hold on to something, because it’s gonna get windy.”
She grips the bolted-down furniture on the far side the passenger bay and watches intently as Cole nears the entrance ramp. As it lowers the pressure nearly sucks him out of the opening, but he maintains his balance, and waits patiently for a reasonably flat surface to become visible below. When the moment arrives he jumps, falling an impossible distance.
Cole sticks the landing with both feet, shaking the ground beneath him. The powdery snow bursts into an opaque cloud around him, giving the impression from a distance that a bomb had just collided with the mountain top. He digs around the snow and locates a loose boulder, half the size of a car. With an effortless motion he jerks it from the ground and presses it overhead, waiting for a jet to pass by. When a fighter comes within range Cole launches the ice-covered rock through the air. It soars into the cockpit, crushing the pilot, and the aircraft spirals out of control, crashing into the mountain with a fiery explosion.
Two additional fighters circle back around in a wide arc, and take aim at the man who just took out a military jet by lobbing a big stone.
Cole jumps and rolls when he spots the flares of light from the gun barrels, allowing him to easily avoid the incoming volleys. While they pass overhead he leaps vertically and catches the wing of one of the jets, snapping it off as it were made of plastic. The smoking fuselage drops in a flat spin. Falling thousands of feet, it disappears into the dense fog below.
As Cole lands back on the ground he throws the wing like a disc, chopping an oncoming jet in half. It explodes before the pilot can eject to a safe distance, blowing him and his charred parachute against the side of a mountain.
Chapter Twenty – Phalanx
Western Australia | January 28, 2012 | 11:49 am, Western Standard Time
As the army of corpses continue to storm the compound, Allison notices something peculiar: a man standing behind a large rock no more than fifty feet away, holding something in his hand...a video camera? What the hell?
A pale-skinned, black haired kid is calmly filming the carnage that’s talking place. Beside him is an equally pale girl – no more than twenty, from the looks if it – dressed as if she’s about to spend an evening at a nightclub. Her ginger hair is tied into pigtails, and her innocent doe eyes are transfixed on the battle. She’s observing as if she’s slightly confused, but not surprised by what’s taking place.
“Hey, fucker!” Allison shouts. She takes a few steps and tosses a tennis ball into the air. She brings her racket down and smashes it with the fury she felt back in Barcelona; the fiery hatred that caused her to manifest for the first time, turning her ball into a deadly meteor, traveling at the speed of sound.
Her anger is blistering. Her aim is flawless.
The ball accelerates towards the kid as he lowers his camera, just in time to see it bounce off his eye socket. “Shit!” he drops the device and claps his hands over his face, bending at the waist. “Damn, was that a tennis ball? You got the fuzz right in my eye!”
Allison groans. “It was supposed to burn a hole through your face.”
“Crap...that still stings, though.” He rubs his eye with his palm and looks up, catching a glimpse of Allison with his good eye. “Wait, don’t I know you from somewhere? Have I seen you on television?”
Now focused on their unwanted spectator, Allison doesn’t realize that the entire horde behind her has stopped moving. The dead haven’t just relented with their attack – they’ve completely frozen. They’re stuck in the same pose they were in when the ball made contact with the filmmaker’s face, like gruesome department store mannequins.
“Now I broke my concentration,” he says with a trace of disappointment, motioning towards the corpses. “Well I guess we were done here, anyway. I got plenty of footage, and you guys all passed the test.”
“Test?” Allison screams, shaking her racket in the pale kid’s direction. “You unleashed an army of zombies on us as a test?”
“Zombies are fictional characters that eat human brains – these guys are just dead. But thanks to me they’re temporarily undead.”
“Zombies, undead – whatever. They’re disgusting and you brought them here.”
“I’m Trent, by the way.” He takes a step towards her and offers his hand in friendship.
She swats his wrist away with her racket. “I don’t give a shit who you are! You’re about to get your ass handed to you.”
Trent frowns. “You seem cooler on your Twitter account.”
It’s then that Brodie realizes it: he knows this kid. He can’t quite place him, but he’s seen him somewhere before.
“Brodie?” Trent shouts with excitement in his voice. “My man! How long has it been?” He runs over to the front porch and throws his arms around Brodie as if they’re long-lost friends reuniting at an airport.
Brodie stands with his arms dangling loose at his sides, still processing the information as he’s being embraced. “Yeah, it’s been a while, bro. Ever since...”
“Harvard!” Trent shouts. “You were my main hook-up.” He turns to the rest of the group and acts as if they haven’t just spent the last ten minutes shooting corpses into bloody chunks.
“Right! Muse. Those things kept me awake for days so I could study, and I aced all my finals. And then something amazing happened.”
“Let me hazard a guess,” Goto adds. “You spontaneously developed the ability to manipulate dead tissue, and reanimate it for your own purposes.”
Jens limps over to them as blood pours freely from the bite marks on his calf, using a rifle as a makeshift crutch. “Dude, I’m all for origin stories, but maybe you should skip forward to the part where you tell us how you found us, and why you just tried to kill us?”
“Sure,” Trent says with a beaming smile. “Let’s go inside. You guys have anything to drink?”
Chapter Twenty-One – Duress
New York City| January 28, 2012 | 2:40 am, Eastern Standard Time
Detective Sean Molloy sits alone in his cramped apartment; a small, dank concrete cube that’s illuminated by a single reading lamp. He’s currently engaging in his favorite pastime: being alone. One of the perks of living in this apartment is that there is absolutely, positively no chance of someone stopping by unexpectedly and disturbing his solitude – at least that’s what the building supervisor assured him when he started renting this unit. He yawns loudly, rubs his eyes, and prepares to log out of his computer when he hears the first knock at his door since he moved in.
The series of loud raps startle him. He folds down the lid of his laptop and sidles as quietly and carefully as he can towards the front door as the impatient knocking persists. He winces as the balls of his feet press into the wooden floor. Each step results in an audible creak. He reaches into the open closet by the entrance and sl
ips the handgun from his holster. The detective unlatches the safety with his thumb and peers through the peep hole, directly into the face of a stunning young woman. Her blue eyes seem to glow unnaturally beneath the fluorescent lighting, and her long platinum hair is striking.
“Who is it?” he shouts through the door.
“Let’s just say that I’m a friend of a friend. And I have something for you.” She lifts a black bag to eye level and motions towards it with an exaggerated up-and-down wave, like she’s presenting a prize on a game show.
His index finger slides away from the trigger. “Leave it outside my door. I’ll pick it up later.”
“It comes with a message...it’ll take a bit of explaining.”
“Okay then,” Molloy responds, “you can explain it to me from the hall.”
Danica huffs and shakes her head with frustration. “Look, if you’re gonna be a little bitch about this, I’ll just call the General and have him come by and give you the message. But I have to warn you, he is not in the best mood right now.”
Oh shit. He knows. Just six months ago Molloy was investigating the site of the now-infamous New York City building collapse, and he was given very strict instructions from his superiors: report any and all findings directly to the General, and no one else. To his surprise he was contacted an hour later, and was offered a generous sum of money – deposited into a numbered offshore account – to keep Mayor James J. Kerrigan apprised of all classified evidence.
Sean Molloy has been on the police force for twenty-nine years, and has never strayed from the letter of the law, but this was his golden opportunity; a chance to pad his retirement fund and hopefully live some sort of a meaningful existence when he finally relinquishes his badge. To live a life beyond the meager pension he’s set to receive, which will afford him few luxuries.
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