by James Somers
The infected leap at the light, attempting to attack and hoping to catch hold of the person moving it. Growls and screams resound in the chamber of stone. Just when they believe they have the one with the light, it moves away again, taking their lives in the process.
A great metallic screech echoes through the space and then a cry comes from another, possibly their other prey though they cannot find it.
“Garth, I’ve found it! Get out of there!”
The call means nothing to the infected—not the words. They search for the sound and find one standing up above in a higher place in the room, turning something attached to the wall. Water roars into the chamber.
The light leaps out of the fray, clamoring onto one of the higher places as water floods into the room of stone. Bodies are swept up in the deluge. Bodies swirl in the overwhelming current. They are carried away through dark tunnels, overcome by relentless rushing water.
Holly waits upon the catwalk in the darkness. Garth made sure that she was secure before implementing his plan. He leaves his katana embedded in the stone, its bright white glow remaining as a beacon to the infected. They are heard now, sloshing and stamping their way down the tunnel toward the room.
She had wanted them to go. Why wait for them here when they might escape, stay ahead of them somehow? However, Garth insists that this is the best plan. He argued that running would be futile. They would not be able to stay ahead, not in these conditions. They couldn’t just run in the dark, and the light would draw them on in pursuit. The zombies would not give up.
Garth waits in the darkness, hidden behind a pillar for the infected to arrive. It only takes a moment before several dozen come flowing into the chamber like bees from a hive. Holly worries Garth will be discovered down there among them before he can strike, but the young man is more skilled than that.
As the infected swarm around the middle of the room where the sword is, Garth somehow calls the weapon to fly to his hand. Holly has no idea how he can do this. She has no idea how Cassie can do what she does. They just can.
Dr. Albert had known of their abilities. He had been attempting, with Garth’s and Cassie’s assistance, to solve the mystery behind the power manifesting through them. Was it magic or the untapped power of the mind, or even gods dwelling among mortal men? Whatever the answer, neither he nor they had uncovered the truth.
The weapon whirls over the heads of milling zombies sloshing in the foul sewer water, landing in Garth’s hand as he pushes out from behind his brick pillar. Holly watches from her perch as the young man moves lithe and powerful among the horde. They follow the light, are drawn to its swirling dance.
Waves of water are churned up, as zombies leap and bound in their attempts to catch Garth. From her vantage point on the scaffold bolted high on one wall of the chamber, Holly can see all that is happening. Even so, Garth remains a blur among thrashing bodies.
One moment they seem to have him and then he is gone again, cutting them down at every turn. Still, more replace those, pursuing the light and the one wielding it. Holly’s eyes catch a passing glimmer from something recognizable—a piece of machinery. She identifies a set of pipes and large valves controlled by valves with bar-shaped handles. These are only paces away from her and accessible from her catwalk.
Holly leaves off watching the frightful scene below. She realizes she might be able to intercede—she hopes. Reaching the levers, she glances over the written warnings as light catches them briefly with Garth’s movements below. She can’t discern exactly what will happen by turning these valves, but she knows almost anything would be preferable to Garth becoming overwhelmed down on the chamber floor by zombies.
Turning the valve with a little difficulty, Holly soon feels the vibration of a great torrent of water oncoming. She hears the roar of it rushing toward their chamber from the half dozen inflowing tunnels below her. A flood of water is coming, and Garth is still down there.
“Garth, I’ve found it! Get out of there!” Holly shouts over the din of fighting and dying in the chamber. A moment later, she realizes that her warning probably makes no sense to Garth. They had not planned for her to flood the chamber. They hadn’t even realized it was a possibility.
However, the warning does manage to call his attention to more than the zombie horde pursuing him around the brick columns of the chamber. The rush of water quickly overcomes every other sound, as it surges through the inflowing tunnels in massive horizontal columns that sweep bodies from their feet, sending the infected tumbling.
Garth manages to leap away from the fray just in time as the chamber quickly becomes a swirling cauldron of filthy water and hapless, helpless infected zombies. They have no way to get out now. Garth clamors over the railing of a lower catwalk, as the water fills up the space almost to the point that Garth might still be swept away in it.
Yet, the deluge doesn’t quite make it that high before the outflow carries the excess water, and the bodies trapped within, away from the chamber. Like some gigantic toilet flushing, the zombies are soon taken under and carried from the chamber, leaving Holly sighing and Garth drenched and breathing heavily, his katana still glowing brightly upon the catwalk.
Urgency and Armaments
Following their close encounter with the zombies in the sewerage system, Garth and Holly soon examined the controls she had used to sweep away their pursuers. As it happened, an access ladder was found close by, leading them back to street level and welcome daylight. The detour through the sewer had been necessary at the time, but neither of them had any desire to remain down below after their close call in the dark.
“We’re just a few blocks away,” Garth whispers, peeking out the door of the maintenance shed. This unassuming little building allowed sewerage workers a place to dress in special protective kits before going down below.
“Any infected out there?” Holly asks from behind.
“I don’t see any at the moment,” Garth says. “There’s something else, though.”
He walks on out the door, allowing Holly to come through and see what he’s talking about. She’s almost startled to find the remains of a military roadblock directly before the maintenance shed. Barriers had been erected in conjunction with a large truck carrying a mounted machine gun. Just from the size of the weapon, she assumes it must be a .50 caliber.
Strewn before the roadblock, dozens of zombie corpses lie bloating in the sun. Flies and carrion birds hold a vigil among the torn bodies. She and Garth might smell of sewage, but this festering decay almost overpowers them.
“There are probably a lot of these outposts throughout London,” Garth muses.
“Yes, and all of them likely overrun like this one,” Holly adds, turning from the carnage to walk over to the roadblock itself. “Even the news reports were saying days ago that London was lost.”
Garth stretches and then flinches. “That burns,” he comments to himself.
Holly stops in her tracks. She turns back to him, a look of concern on her face. They’ve just been splashing through untreated sewer water. If Garth has cut himself on something, it could easily become infected.
“Where?” she asks.
“Across my back,” Garth says, rearranging his katana scabbard so Holly can get a good look.
Garth’s shirt is a sleeveless variety of undershirt, so it’s not hard to see. Despite the grime, the torn cloth and bloody stain are unmistakable. Immediately, Holly is reminded of a similar incident several days ago inside the infirmary within the Tombs. Garth has four lines drawn by sharp fingernails across his back and, nearby, a clearly defined bite.
Holly closes her eyes, tears rolling free. Her hand is trembling.
“Can you see anything?” Garth asks curiously.
Holly’s face becomes like stone. She strides away toward the roadblock, leaving Garth standing in the road with his shirt hiked up above the wounds.
“Holly?”
“We have to hurry,” she says, rummaging distractedly through equ
ipment discarded upon the ground or abandoned in vehicles.
She finds several pistols and one gun belt containing pouches for ammunition clips. Fortunately the soldiers uniformly used the same weapons. The mounted machine gun is out of the question, but she finds several other weapons worth taking.
Among them, and the one that catches her eye, is an L86A2 machine gun. She was trained on this weapon with MI6 and found it to her liking. Holly smiles, picks it up and then remembers Garth waiting for her response.
When she turns back to him, she finds that he hasn’t moved. His expression is curious and questioning. Still, he’s waiting and watching, wondering at her sudden change of mood.
Her expression turns grim again, raising the machine gun to her chest. It seems too large in her hands, but still she radiates confidence. Garth’s eyes widen as the gun comes into view above the barricade behind which Holly is now standing.
“We have to find Jonathan,” she says, then adds a moment later, “before it’s too late.”
“Too late?” Garth asks, walking toward the barricade.
Holly closes her eyes, sighing. When she opens them again, Garth is standing just on the other side of the barricade. Another tear escapes down her cheek.
“Your wounds,” she says.
Garth’s curious expression abruptly becomes blank.
Holly nods slowly. “They clawed your skin. You’re bleeding from it. That alone might not be enough, but you’ve also been bitten.”
Garth’s shoulders slump noticeably at the revelation, but only for a moment. His eyes rise to fix on her again. He strides toward the barrier and her.
“Holly, you’ve mentioned Jonathan having something to do with this cure we need, but you haven’t said how that happens.”
“Because I’m not sure how it happens,” she says calmly in reply.
“But you’re a scientist,” Garth says. “You should be able to find—” he trails off as Holly’s expression grows hopeless.
“I’m a scientist and so was Dr. Albert, but we didn’t find a cure,” she says, more tears beginning to stream down her face. “We had a multimillion dollar facility at our disposal and some of the finest minds in the field, yet we still didn’t find a cure.”
They stand there together silently as a breeze blows the smell of rot around them with light debris. Holly feels a great weight of despair settling upon her. How can they stop this? How can she find the answer on her own, when every other virologist she knew is dead in the Tombs, or turned into the very monsters they want to stop? How can she do any of this when she is a traitor to her own country, a charlatan and a sham, a wolf in sheep’s clothing trying to aid a deadly Russian agent in his attempt to kidnap Jonathan and whisk him away to the waiting clutches of Walter Ivanovich and his ilk?
For a brief moment, Holly considers telling Garth about who she really is, about what she has been doing at MI6, in addition to her research with Dr. Albert. She wonders if he will call her a traitor. He might even draw his katana and try to kill her. What would she do then—shoot the man who has managed, despite being a few years younger, to catch her eye recently and save her life numerous times?
She’s pretty certain she couldn’t do that to him. After all, the very reason Holly feels so helpless at the moment is because Garth has now fallen victim to this plague. Oh, he’s not a ravening zombie yet, but how long does he have? How long before she’ll be forced to use the weapon in her arms to gun him down?
Garth’s expression becomes resolute. “Then we do the best we can, while we can,” he says. “Let’s get to Battersea and meet up with Jonathan and Cassie.”
Holly follows with her gaze as Garth gathers up a bag carried by one of the soldiers and stuffs it with pistols and smaller arms and ammo. She knows he’s doing it for her sake. Garth doesn’t like firearms—he never has. Even when given the opportunity to train with them, he lost interest quickly, proving time and again that he could do just as well in a fight with his blade, if not better.
“You had better gather some ammunition for that thing before we get going,” Garth says, referring to the L86A2 machine gun Holly is cradling in her arms like a child.
She sniffs at her running nose, deciding to follow his example. It’s not over until it’s over. She doesn’t know if there is any hope for finding a cure, but there is none at all when they give up trying.
Gathering ammunition magazines from a rack in the back of the abandoned army truck, Holly loads herself down and then deposits the remaining in the canvas bag Garth carries.
As she zips up the bag, Garth says in low voice, “If I do begin to change into one of those things, I don’t want you to wait, Holly. Don’t take a chance. Just do what has to be done.”
Holly leans toward him, wrapping her free arm around his neck. She kisses his cheek and whispers in his ear, “I will.”
She releases him and they depart the desolate scene of carnage—one repeated hundreds of times over throughout London over the past few weeks. Battersea Power Station waits in the near distance. With any luck, they’ve already faced the worst obstacles to getting there safely.
Warm and Dark
Hu Takashi is tired; more tired than he has felt in as long as he can remember. No matter how hard he fights it, the urge to curl up with the others and simply sleep is compelling. He doesn’t know how much longer he will fight it. That desire, as much as his desire ever was to spread his disease and consume human prey, has become all important and nearly irresistible.
Others of his kind have already succumbed to this new need. Their bodies have begun to change. The energetic, insatiable beasts, full of fiery hunger, have slowed considerably. They take prey as they can, but often the older among them take what is left over when the newer members move on to their next victims.
The newly infected are ravenous, but those like Hu are becoming satisfied. The burning has diminished to an underwhelming and constant fatigue. Hu knows things again—things he had temporarily forgotten.
He recognizes what he is—that he is a part of a collective. Hu is pleased by his belonging to this assembly. For a time, he was little more than blind fury, a hunter on the rampage. He sees and recognizes this in the newly infected. He understands their burning even though he is no longer experiencing it. Soon they too will become like him. They will desire to sleep. Yet, for now, they know nothing but the terrible drive to feed the burning within.
Hu sees a building for a building again. He recognizes objects like cars, knowing their names and their purposes. None of these purposes stir any desire in him. He does not want to use them. His desire is changing. He can see the realization coming to him more and more. He and his kind must take their place in the world. They must dominate.
He is unsure how this will be accomplished. It is like a mystery to him. These sleeping forms surely cannot do what will be necessary, he surmises. Yet, the surety of that goal remains ever present.
Soon he will sleep, as others do. Already, Hu is trudging along with some who seek the rest their bodies now crave—demanding that they cease and desist from their former activities. He will trust and obey that call. It served him well during the time when blinding, burning fire stirred within his bones. It will serve him again.
The place where others have gone is warm and dark—a tunnel dug into the earth by the architecture of men. Concrete and steel ensure the structure. It will not collapse.
Hu passes from the sunlight into a place of perpetual night. He does not recall the name attached to this place, but he does remember traveling through it on a train. The memory is vague, but it still resides in his mind. Before a few days ago, he could recall none of these pieces of his former existence. The foggy veil upon his mind is lifting.
Marching among a listless procession of at least one hundred people, Hu leaves the outside world behind. Together, he and his new family wind their ways through the dark toward a mass of warm bodies. The entire tunnel radiates the heat of thousands of his kind, all packed toget
her like a colony of ants.
This is not the only one of these gatherings taking place in London. There are many. As the infected pass through phases, they lose much of the momentum that carried them zealously on in their earlier stages of transformation. Already, millions are heading into the dark places, huddling together for the transformation.
Hu finds the great mass of bodies deep inside the tunnel where the light cannot find them. He finds his place among the others, balling up in the fetal position, conserving his body heat and sharing it with everyone assembled. His eyes close, as he shuffles and squirms into a comfortable position.
It is very pleasant in this place. He might purr, if he was a cat. It is very warm and very dark. Others already sleep, and more are coming to do so. It is time for him and his kind to change.
Dreams Within Dreams
A true friend is someone that won’t trip you when you’re both running from a zombie mob—Jonathan Parks
I still feel a little guilty about leaving those people at the apartment complex we passed. However, I know Cassie is right about what would happen if I tried to go in alone. It would be an absolute mess. I certainly wouldn’t allow Cassie to go with me. I won’t put her in harm’s way, if I can help it. Still, my attempt would likely stir up the infected milling about the place, turning them into a full blown ravenous horde instead of the docile state they seem to be in at the moment.
Once we establish ourselves at the power station, Garth will want to go back with me. He seems to be that kind of guy, now that we’re getting along better. I had worried that he was the sort to be rude and bullish. However, it seems that was just a bad first impression. He kept Holly and Cassie safe, and he helped me get away from that mess at Sainsbury. I think we might end up good friends, if we have enough time to get to know one another.