by Tim Curran
Gunshots.
Just ahead.
She cut between two houses and saw a group of rabids (ten or more) assault a squad of soldiers. Lead was flying in every direction, but still the rabids came on, smothering the soldiers with their superior numbers. She saw white suits being shredded, heard screaming and enjoyed it all maybe too much.
A lone solider, weaponless now, was encircled by rabids, mostly women. He was pressed against a brick wall, a solid line of them approaching him. He tried to climb the wall, ran to the left, the right.
Slowly, inexorably, they pressed in, making awful hissing sounds, hands held out before them.
Ruby Sue watched until his screams subsided and then slipped away into the night.
A pack of rabids found her on Chestnut.
She faced them fearlessly.
They tried to ring her in and she squeezed off shots with the Browning semi-auto until they were all down. Then she used the .357 on them. Most were dead, but a few were only gutshot, crawling at her through tangles of their own viscera.
She left them like that. Let them suffer.
In the distance, she saw the municipal building.
She remembered Lou telling her that was where the police were headquartered. She had one speedloader left for the Colt, about eight rounds for the Browning. She would need more ammo before she was done.
Eyes fixed and determined, she made her way towards the towering building.
The night was still young.
Plenty of darkness to kill by.
-GENOCIDE-
30
They made it maybe thirty feet into the rambling confines of the municipal building when one of the crazy bastards came stumbling out of the shadows to meet them.
Lou and Lisa hung back while Johnny faced the psycho dead-on.
Something he didn’t mind too much, considering he’d gotten his shotgun back now.
The rabid was a big, ugly man that could’ve passed for Joe’s twin brother, save that he was balding and beardless. He was shirtless, wearing stained jeans and rubber boots. There was something almost profane about that jiggling mountain of ashen flesh before them. Drool hung from his chin like stalactites. He had something in his filthy right fist that at first looked like a club but upon closer inspection could be nothing but a human femur, dyed dark with old blood. A cord of gristle hung from the hip ball.
“I’ve been waiting all night, friend,” the flabby, leering monstrosity said. “What took you so long?”
Johnny shook his head.
He hated the idea of shooting this creature, repellent though he was; he started busting caps all over and everyone and everything would know right where to find them. He had high hopes they could do what he had in mind covertly.
But the rabid came on, swinging the thigh bone.
Johnny stood his ground and gave him a burst to the belly.
The rabid stumbled back three, four feet, but did not go down. There was a huge, smoking crater where his belly had been. Intestines—what was left of them—trailed out like burnt sausages. He reached in there with one shaking hand, rooted around in his abdomen, brought his hand back out. It was dark with blood and cinders of flesh.
His raging yellow eyes never left Johnny.
A good deal of his anatomy had been sprayed against the marble wall behind him. With a crazy, agonized smile, he shambled forward, bone raised high to strike.
Johnny stepped back now, a cold terror in his belly.
He racked the pump and aimed for the guy’s head.
He pulled the trigger.
It blew away the left side of the guy’s face, leaving a ruin of blistered meat, tendrils of smoke puffing from the bleeding cavity. He made it two, three steps and pitched over face-first, limbs still attempting locomotion.
“C’mon,” Johnny told the others in an airless voice.
They passed a bank of elevators and then paused before a set of steps climbing into the darkness. There was a body sprawled near the bottom. A naked woman.
Johnny approached her carefully, nudged her with his combat boot.
A surge of panic rode through him as she began to move, but it was only gravity, he saw, her body tumbling down the last few steps onto the floor. Her chest was riddled with bullet wounds, the trail of blood—still wet—glistened on the steps. Somebody must’ve shot her (and with an automatic weapon, judging by the pattern of wounds) and she dragged herself down the steps and died near the bottom.
Nothing spooky about that.
Johnny started up.
“Shouldn’t we try the police station?” Lou suggested, clutching the wound in his shoulder Johnny had bandaged with strips of rags. “It might be worth a shot.”
Lisa licked her lips, shook violently. “I thought…I thought you said the place was trashed?”
“Maybe I overlooked something.”
Johnny shook his head. “You didn’t. It won’t do us any good. Even if we found a working radio, we couldn’t transmit. It would be just like the radios in the cruisers. That army out there, they’re jamming everything. They don’t want any messages getting out.”
Lisa and Lou didn’t argue with that.
They both remembered how Johnny had tried in vain to raise the outside world with one of the radios in a parked police car and had gotten nothing but static.
Isolated. Contained. That’s what they were.
They submitted. They both knew what Johnny’s alternate plan was and it was as good as any. Make for the roof. It was defensible. Lock themselves up there and wait for dawn.
At least that’s what he told them.
His real plan was only slightly different in that it had something to do with a glorious death.
He led them up through the darkness, his bald head gleaming with sweat.
Go slow, he told himself. There’s probably rabids everywhere. And there might be soldiers, too. You run into a group of them and you’re all dead.
So he moved slowly, quietly up the steps, knowing he had only two rounds left in his shotgun and they were valuable. More priceless than gold now.
They made it to the second floor, or Johnny did.
Lou and Lisa waited on the stairs. The second floor was much like the first, dimly lit, corridors snaking this way and that, studded with doors.
Johnny waved them forward.
He kept the 12-gauge before him, the stock greasy beneath his sweating fingers. He rounded a corner, coming down low. There were a few bodies sprawled on the floor. Dead rabids, a man and a woman. They were both naked. Looked like they’d been fucking when the soldiers found them. Their bodies were riddled with bullet holes. Brass shell casings littered the floors.
The rabids were tough.
They could take shit that would have killed normal people five times over. But, still, this many rounds spent on these two was a real waste. Johnny could see those soldiers in his mind, spraying down the copulating rabids on full auto. He’d seen plenty of that in Vietnam—cherries, newbies, spending magazine after magazine when two, three well-directed bursts would have done the job quite nicely.
It told him something about these troops.
Either they were scared shitless or inexperienced.
He figured it was probably both.
Okay, keep going.
He led the other two past the bodies. A few offices were lit up, light spilling into the hallway. He didn’t like that—either the lights had been left on or somebody had turned them on.
The latter was a possibility he didn’t care for.
Why he didn’t see the guy squatting in the doorway of the dark office was beyond him. In the old days, the guy would have been dead. But tonight Johnny had walked practically right up on him. He didn’t even notice him until he’d seen the gleam of metal from the rifle barrel.
Johnny went down low, bringing the shotgun to bear.
“Don’t even think about it, motherfucker,” the guy said. “You touch that trigger, I cut you all down.”
And that was what stopped Johnny.
His finger touched the trigger, then retreated.
He knew he could grease the guy…but he didn’t want Lou and Lisa paying the price for it. So he let the shotgun down, knew that they were at the mercy of this sonofabitch. Good thing was, his eyes were normal. They didn’t shine at all. If rabids started using guns, the jig was up.
“Come in here,” the guy said. “It’s cool.”
They filed into the office, sat next to each other on the floor in front of a big desk. It was just a typical office—desks, filing cabinets, computers, water cooler in the corner.
The guy stayed in the doorway.
With the moonlight flooding in through the big windows in the rear, they could see him well enough. He was one of the soldiers. He had a white protective suit on, sans hood. Some young white guy, early twenties maybe, narrow face, crewcut.
“I ain’t gonna shoot you,” he said. “You’re the first normals I’ve seen in an hour. Creepers are everywhere, man. Them bastards’ll eat your ass for breakfast soon as look at you. If they don’t fuck you first.”
“What’s your name?” Johnny asked.
“Johnson…nah, fuck that, name’s Tony Terra. You?”
They introduced themselves.
“Why’d you say Johnson?” Lou wanted to know.
He laughed at that, plugged a little cigar in the corner of his mouth, lit it. “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” he said. “Not supposed to, you know. Smoke, that is. Creepers can see in the dark like fucking cats. They can smell body heat. That’s what they told us. A cigar? A cigarette? Like a bonfire to those animals. But, fuck it, right?” He dragged off his cigar, blew smoke into the shadows. “Reason I said Johnson, man, was because we all got code names, you see? Smiths and Johnsons and Browns and Blacks—you get the idea. Must be a hundred Johnsons. I was Johnson-12, see? We never knew each other’s names. That’s the way this shit works.”
Lou said, “You’re in the army?”
“Yes and no. I was part of the force, man. ERG. That’s Emergency Response Group. My battalion is one of dozens, so they say. Some shit comes down, we’re trained to contain it. We don’t take our orders from the army, though.” He laughed. “Nobody knows who we take our orders from. Ain’t that a rush?”
Lisa was moaning, her body shuddering with spasms.
Terra was keeping an eye on her. “She infected?”
Johnny assured him she wasn’t. “She’s coming down from her drug habit.”
“Junk?” Terra said. “Yeah, my brother was on that shit. Bad news.”
“What the hell happened here?” Lou asked, lighting a cigarette.
Terra shrugged. “I ain’t supposed to say. We’re not even supposed to talk to civilians. We’re supposed to consider ‘em all infected and shoot ‘em dead. Jesus H. Christ. I trained for this—nuclear, biological, chemical, NBC—for the past three years. But, oh shit, none of us ever thought—fuck, man.” He cradled his head between his knees, sobbed. Sighing, he looked at them. “They told us there was an outbreak. We thought it was another goddamn drill, a war game. But it was real. They told us an unfriendly foreign power had dumped some germs on this little town. I don’t even know what fucking state I’m in!”
“You’re in Michigan,” Johnny said. “It’s okay now, pal. Just tell us.”
Terra sat there silently for a moment, rolling the cherry of his cigar across the sole of his boot. “So, we were sent here to contain this mess, see that it didn’t spread. But, holy shit, those creepers…like zombies or vampires or something straight out of them horror movies, right? They don’t die easy.” He licked his lips, looking close to a breakdown. “We came in three, four hours back, surrounded the town. We came in by helicopter—all of us. Even the hummers and equipment came in by air. They started sending in recon teams right away, but none of ‘em came back. Once we were deployed, they broke us into platoons and told us to kill everyone. Even the kids, the babies.” He started crying for real now. “All the little kids are monsters…oh, oh, oh, Jesus…we were shooting down toddlers. Oh Christ in Heaven, I’m gonna burn in Hell, I’m gonna burn in Hell…”
Johnny went to him, put an arm around him. “No, you’re not. People who created this stuff, let it loose on this town, yeah, they’re going to burn.”
It took Terra about five minutes to compose himself. “Okay, I’m all right. I’m cool. They told us to kill everyone. No exceptions. It’s what we were trained to do, so we did it. When we were done, we were to burn this town to the ground. Nothing could be left.” He motioned towards the window, the orange glow reflected on the glass. “Somebody already started that, though.”
Johnny thought it all through and still had questions. “Did they tell you what it was? What these people are contaminated with?”
He shrugged. “A virus of some kind. Spread by bites, body fluids. Supposed to be some shit they engineered from the rabies virus. Agent-X. That’s what they said. But there were rumors…”
“Yeah?”
Terra started talking in a whisper now. “Fucking-A. Guys have been saying that it ain’t fucking terrorists or any of that shit, they’re saying it’s us. Saying we created it. That we used it—”
“In Vietnam?”
Terra looked like he’d been slapped. “How the hell you know that?” He looked concerned.
“I was in Vietnam,” Johnny told him. “I saw what it did there. We called it Laughing Man because it drove people stark crazy. They told us it was a defoliant. But nobody bought it. We saw what that garbage did. My team got infected.”
Terra nodded, patting Johnny’s knee. “Yeah. My platoon, man, creepers wiped ‘em all out…downstairs. Motherfucker. I got away, hid out.” His face looked like it had been sculpted from sallow wax. “Rumor says they developed it back then, but they shelved it for further study. Then, I don’t know, while back they pulled it out of the freezer and started refining it or something.”
The ash on Lou’s cigarette was an inch long. It fell onto his lap. “Why did they spray it here? What the hell were they thinking?”
“Guys were saying it wasn’t on purpose. An accident or something,” Terra told him.
Johnny felt suddenly vindicated.
After all these years of bullshit and denial, it had all come full circle now. There was no getting around the truth any longer. Oh, sure, they’d kill everyone and burn the town down, but the truth would come out…eventually.
In one form or another.
There would be too many questions.
“Why don’t you come with us?” Johnny asked Terra. “We’re making for the roof. We’re gonna hide out until dawn.”
“Yeah, fucking vampires, they don’t like the sunlight. They told us that much.” Terra looked half out of his mind. “I can hear the boys out there, can’t you? Boom, bang, boom. Mopping up this here burg. Fucking right. Flamethrowers and everything. Shit yeah. They go crazy when you crisp ‘em, creepers do. Start jumping around and trying to fight the flames. Sometimes, they don’t even give a shit that they’re burning—they come right at you. Then you gotta pop ‘em. Pop ‘em and drop ‘em. Blood and bodies and brains. I’m covered in it. Fuck if I ain’t.”
Johnny led the others back out into the corridor.
Terra took up the rear, with Johnny in front, the others in the middle.
“Let’s be careful out there,” Terra said and started giggling. He pulled something out of the ammo pouch slung around his shoulder. He hung it over his neck.
A necklace of human ears.
31
“Stone-two?”
“Johnson-four?”
“Smith-Seventeen?”
Silence. Maybe a minute, maybe two.
“Where the fuck are you guys?”
From where she hid, Ruby Sue was hearing it all.
Unlike the others, she’d come into the municipal building from the back. She’d slipped through the rear courtyard and waded through dozens of dismembered corpses d
ressed in red protective suits that had once been sparkling white. She’d didn’t spend too much time studying the fallen soldiers, just long enough to know they were dead, to see that they’d been mutilated, partially devoured.
Now she was in the garage.
But she wasn’t alone.
On the other side, hidden by the looming hulk of a fire truck were the soldiers. They sounded panicked and with good reason: most of their comrades had been wiped out, apparently by a large force of rabids.
Ruby Sue was crouched behind a pump truck.
The garage was huge and shadowy, lit dimly by emergency lights and moonlight seeping through tall windows set along the far wall. There were two fire trucks in there, a half dozen other city vehicles…not to mention the bodies of other soldiers, sprawled and twisted in heaps along the concrete floor. There was one a few feet away from her. He was missing his left arm and his protective hood had been ripped off, his face meticulously stripped down to the skull beneath. The grinning death mask watched her, but offered no suggestions.
What to do?
She waited there and contemplated it.
Her original mission had been to kill as many rabids as she could. Payback for Joe. Now she was starting to wonder who the real enemy was here.
She could hear the soldiers whispering amongst themselves.
She had to wait until they moved; the state they were in, they’d shoot anything they saw.
Not good.
About ten minutes later, she saw them crawl up towards the front of the garage, moving beneath vehicles on their bellies like lizards. They were uncomfortably close when they re-grouped.
“There’s only four of us,” a voice said. “That’s all.”
“We had thirty guys here,” another said, his voice breaking with stress. “They…they can’t all be dead.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Shit.”
“Don’t be such a pussy. This is what you trained for.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Lock and load. Let’s do this. We don’t have a choice.”
“The radio—”