The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  “He’s…he’s, uh, he said soon.”

  Chapter 23

  1– 9:36 p.m.

  —The Walton Facility, New York

  Joe Swan circled the grounds three times, flying the Blackhawk like a noob. With his right hand damp on the cyclic and his shoulders tensed and his nerves frayed, it was no wonder.

  There were zombies below and they weren’t in any way “manageable.” They seemed numberless, faceless, fearless. Jennifer Jackson, in the window right behind him, was working the M240 in short bursts. He could feel each pull of the trigger like a little tremor beneath his buttocks.

  Jennifer had a thousand rounds and after ten minutes, she had to wonder if it was going to be enough. There were just so many of the monsters. That’s how she saw them: monsters. Black-eyed, splintered-tooth, clawed monsters. This was her first time seeing them so close and it was no lie that her stomach was sour and her heart was racing.

  She began to curse under her breath every time she fired the machine gun. Heads burst like balloons and arms flailed and black blood flowed—and still they kept coming. She was just wondering what they would do if it turned out there were more monsters than bullets, when the missiles started flying.

  “Who’s shooting those?” she asked into her helmet mic. Leaning over the blistering hot gun, she stuck her head out the window and stared around looking for another helicopter or a jet, afraid that they could be targeted by accident.

  Swan brought the bird up, thinking the same thing. “There are three UAVs out there. At least one is armed.”

  “Great,” she muttered. She’d seen the “cockpit” of a UAV; with its little monitors and the comfy chairs, it had looked like an elaborate gaming console. It hadn’t inspired confidence.

  The missile kept blazing out of the night and the Blackhawk wasn’t blotted out of the sky. Eventually they were cleared to land and Swan picked out a spot outside the grounds where the ground wasn’t filled with debris and bodies. “Oh, boy,” he whispered as he shut down the engine.

  His stomach was filled with butterflies and, as steady as he was in the air, he felt the shakes coming on. “Okay, let’s do this,” he said, unstrapping from the chair. Action was the surest way to combat fear. It was something he had learned in flight school which had been, until this very moment, the scariest thing he had ever experienced. This was a hundred times worse.

  He was more than a little embarrassed by his fear when he climbed into the back and saw how cool the FBI woman was acting. Behind her mask, PFC Jackson had a sheen of sweat around her huge round eyes, Anna Holloway was practically panting, and Lieutenant Eng kept fiddling with his mask, afraid that it was leaking. But Special Agent Katherine Pennock acted as if this was nothing but a training mission and that those weren’t pieces of bodies scattered everywhere, and the M4 in her hand would shoot paintballs instead of 5.56mm rounds.

  “Seal check,” she ordered. When that was done, she looked the four of them over from head to toe. They weren’t in MOPP or bio-suits. She felt that the MOPP gear was too bulky and that the bio-suits were too thin. They wore black tactical gear, armored vests that covered their necks, shoulders and chests. They also had thick gloves as well as elbow and forearm pads. Katherine felt like a football player in her gear.

  The outfits weren’t close to being “virus” resistant, but they didn’t need to be. According to Anna and Eng, as well as the most up to date literature, the Com-cells could not hurt you just by landing on exposed skin. It needed a route into the body. It could get in via a cut or through the lungs. The masks would keep their lungs safe and, just in case any blood was sprayed, they had six gallons of bleach on board the Blackhawk and each carried a small spray bottle of it.

  For weapons, they had M4s which was a bit of a disappointment to Katherine. She had wanted the stopping power and close-in accuracy of automatic shotguns, only none had been available on such short notice. Her disappointed was nothing compared to Anna and Eng’s, who were going in, not just unarmed, but also in chains.

  They had raised a stink and made demands and threatened not to go, to which Katherine had calmly said, “You’re going. Even if I have to throw you out of the helicopter myself, you’re going.” More for her sake than for theirs, she allowed them each to carry a light riot shield along with their other armor.

  “I have point,” she said. “Jackson will follow me, then Anna, then Eng. Snow has our six.” She gave the pilot a long look, perhaps seeing the fear in him, perhaps not. He couldn’t tell. “Keep your head on a swivel. I know it’s cliche, but in this case, you have to.”

  Swan understood, perfectly. Although their masks were state of the art, they still muffled the ears, making it hard to hear, and they compressed vision so that little in their periphery could be seen without turning the head. As the man in back, he would have to either walk backwards or keep his head going continuously back and forth as they moved.

  “Got it,” he said, but quietly, and she had to ask him to repeat himself. “I got it,” he practically shouted. “Let’s do this.”

  She nodded, and with a deep breath, she moved out, walking in a crouch with her M4 held up to her chin.

  The gates of the facility were open and bent. Days before, a car had come through them at high speed and now they hung askew, making an irritating metallic grind of a noise as the light wind pushed them gently back and forth. Eng stuck a rock beneath the bottom of it to stop the noise.

  The silence was almost worse. The group paused thirty feet into the journey to listen, but there was nothing to hear. Katherine supposed that should have been better, only it wasn’t. It felt as though they were standing under not just one big rock hanging from the side of a cliff, but an entire avalanche worth of them. The silence was a lie.

  Going on tip-toe seemed like the best plan, but Katherine wouldn’t give in to the temptation. It would show fear and she didn’t think it would take all that much more fear before Anna went rabbit and took off, chains or no chains. The blonde had a frantic grip on her riot shield and she was breathing so fast that her mask was fogging up.

  “Relax,” Katherine told her. “I don’t think there’s anything left alive out here. It’s what’s up there that should scare you.” She pointed at the looming hospital. It was a charred and partially collapsed monument to greed and evil. The Com-cells had been an inspired idea to save mankind from the cruelties of fate, however mankind proved they weren’t worthy, changing what was perfect and turning it hideous.

  “Then what do you call that?” Anna pointed at a thing. In the dark, it didn’t look human and barely seemed to be a zombie. It was the upper part of a body, just the torso, a single arm and a head that was held on by a few tendons, the threads of its spinal column and maybe an artery or two.

  It stared at them with one unblinking eye. It stared as it dragged itself along by the single arm.

  “I’m going to puke,” Jennifer Jackson whispered, wagging her head side to side as she stared back into the eye.

  “Ignore it,” Katherine said, taking the soldier by the arm and pulling her on into the war-torn grounds. “It can’t hurt you, so put it out of your mind.” She stepped around the creature and then went straight for the front doors of the main hospital, hoping to get in, find what they needed and get out again before anything whatsoever could happen.

  The doors were closed and perhaps locked, not that it mattered. The glass walls all along the front of the building had been shattered days before by the explosion Anna had cooked up in her attempt to simultaneously escape the building and destroy any evidence that she’d anything to do with the zombies.

  As they slipped inside, the shards of glass crunched underfoot making Katherine’s skin crawl. It sounded like something with a hundred teeth was alive beneath the tile. Alive and chewing on bone.

  There was carpet further on and she hurried to it, only to be brought up short; there were big splotches of dried blood all over the floor. Each of the splotches showed where someone had died
, only there weren’t any bodies. For some reason, seeing the splotches made Eng snort in an unpleasant way. Jackson turned and glared at him, but he only smiled.

  “You’re fucked up,” Jennifer said. “You did all this and you have the gall to smile?”

  He said something in Mandarin, leaned his riot shield against his legs, and then lifted his arms and gazed around as if in satisfaction at the destruction he had wrought. The lobby, at one point, had been open and expansive, and beautifully decorated to give the feeling of not just opulence, but also warmth, which was a very difficult note to hit. Now it was like a cave sketched from a nightmare.

  Where once the colors of gold and opal were exquisitely and impossibly matched, there were now only shades of black. The walls had been warped from the heat of the fire and where the ceiling hadn’t fallen in, it looked as though it was threatening to. It sounded like it as well. The building groaned above them.

  “This is a waste of time,” Swan said. “Nothing could have survived the fire. Nothing useful at least. We should get the hell out of here.”

  Eng snorted again, this time derisively. “Your fear is making you weak and it’s making you stupid. The labs were constructed with containment in mind. A BSL-3 lab may very well survive a fire.” Swan looked unconvinced.

  “We’re here either way, Swan,” Katherine said. “We might as well check things out. Where are the stairs?” The bank of elevators was obvious, however with all the soot and the charring and the black splashes of blood on every door, it was hard to tell what was what, exactly.

  “Around the corner,” Anna said, hollow-voiced. A stunned look had replaced the fear. It was hard for her to believe this was the same building, but it was even harder to believe that she had been the one that destroyed it. She had liked the Walton facility. It had been pretty. And they had done important work there. Yes, she had been a corporate spy, but that didn’t mean she had wanted the Com-cells to fail.

  Katherine was ready to move, but Anna grabbed her arm. “I didn’t want any of this to happen,” she said, looking Katherine in the eye, “I was being set up and, and there was this guy…Von Braun. He was a zombie, but he could think as long as he was on drugs. Did they tell you that can happen? It’s opiates. Opiates calm them enough for them to think, only their thoughts are always…rancid. It was Von Braun who did all this. It was him. I-I just lit the fire to try to contain the rest of the zombies. You believe me, right?”

  “I believe the evidence,” Katherine told her. “But then again, you have your pardon so it doesn’t matter what I believe.”

  “It matters to me. I’m not the bad guy here.”

  Katherine saw that Anna clearly believed this. Katherine did not, however. “And what about the people you turned into zombies on Long Island? What are your flimsy justifications for those deaths?”

  Anna drew in a breath to answer, but couldn’t find the right combination of words that would allow her to talk her way out of those criminal acts. “I don’t need to justify myself,” she finally said. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like. And besides, like you said, I have my pardon.”

  “I suppose now would be a good time to remind you that the pardon is contingent upon you finding the cure. No cure, no pardon.”

  The two women stared hard at each other before Anna smiled, showing a dimple in her cheek. “Well, we really aren’t far. Up a few flights and that’s it.”

  If only they were that lucky. The main stairwell in the central part of the building was the darkest place Katherine had ever been in. The darkness was so thick that when she turned on the under-barrel tactical light, the beam seemed to get swallowed up after only a few feet. She went slowly, crouched behind her weapon, fully expecting to be attacked.

  They went up in a single file and found that the set of stairs were uninhabited by zombies, at least as far as the second floor. Then they came to a strange jumble of desks and chairs and lamps, and all sorts of trash. It packed the stairwell, leaving them no room to get by.

  “We were trapped in the upper floors, and we didn’t have any weapons,” Anna explained. “We used this stuff as a barricade. There might be a way around, though. There are other stairs.”

  In order to find them, all they had to do was manage the obstacle course that was the second floor and third floors. The gas-fed explosion had been located on the third floor and that was where the fire was the hottest and the damage the greatest. Eventually, most of the third floor had collapsed and had fallen into the second floor.

  They came out of the stairwell and Katherine stood, gaping about at the alien landscape. The fire and the collapse had turned the simple layout of hospital rooms and nurse’s stations and the like into nothing that Katherine had ever seen before.

  There were very few walls and nothing that resembled a hall or corridor, or even a floor. Everything around them was black and misshapen. Shining their flashlights only seemed to make things appear even stranger. In front of them were what seemed like spears jutting up aggressively, and to the side were mounds of metal that had been melted into bizarre shapes. Across their path were twists of copper pipes that were so intricate that they were simply beyond reason or explanation.

  Katherine waited for Anna or Eng to give her some guidance, however both were turning in little circles, dumbfounded. “Where to from here?” Katherine asked. After a final turn, Eng jerked his riot shield to their left.

  She led the way through the treacherous terrain, sometimes falling, sometimes stepping on things that seemed stable, but in reality were like little traps. At one point or another, each of them found themselves hip deep in the refuse, unable to free themselves.

  With their hands cuffed and the bulky shields getting in the way, this occurred more to Anna and Eng than to the others. It was a slow track to get to the north stairwell. Here Katherine had the team pause to rest. As they did, they sprayed each other with the bleach solution.

  She had wanted to give them five minutes, however three minutes into the break there were a series of explosions in the front of the building. Jennifer Jackson and Joe Swan were the first to leap up; Eng was the last.

  “On your damned feet!” Swan ordered, grabbing the Chinese man by his armored vest and hauling him up. “That sounded like it came from the helicopter. Like they were shooting at it.”

  He wanted to head back down, as did Anna. Katherine overruled them. “We’re going up! If someone is shooting missiles at the helicopter, we’re screwed. It’s too big of a target to miss. We just have to hope that they’re not. Come on.” She pushed up the stairs, thrusting aside computers, desks, lab equipment, and all sorts of trash until she came to the fourth floor where the door was hanging by a single hinge and looked ready to fall on the first person who touched it.

  There were more explosions and Swan was so anxious that he wanted to kick the door aside. The chopper was his baby, after all. There was a connection between man and machine that non-pilots could never understand. With steadfast calm, Katherine made him return to his position at the back of the team before she stepped past the door and onto the fourth floor.

  It was much more intact compared to the second floor. Only a few walls had crumbled and only in a dozen or so places had there been localized cave-ins from the floor above. The fire damage wasn’t nearly as bad, either. When the third floor had collapsed into the second, it had smothered the worst of the fires.

  “Follow me and keep buttoned up,” Katherine said. With her M4 raised, she went down the shadow-struck hallway, shining her light back and forth, pausing at intersecting halls or at doors. She didn’t have to go far onto the floor before spying a room with a front facing window.

  They all hurried to it and stared down at the Blackhawk. It was surrounded by the dead. Hundreds of them. Some were climbing into it, others were climbing under, but most were just milling around it, perhaps attracted by the fading smell of humans.

  As they watched, three more missiles streaked in and exploded in great
balls of fire and smoke and flying body parts. The Blackhawk rocked on its wheels but suffered no visible damage. Whoever was operating the UAV was doing their best to kill the beasts without hitting the team’s one method of escape.

  “Stop! Damn it!” Swan screamed pounding on the glass. He knew better than anyone that the Hellfire missile was extremely accurate, hitting within five meters of its target over 96% of the time. But all it took was one bent fin, one loose nut, one minor miscalculation and his baby would be scrap.

  Katherine was about to berate the warrant officer for being loud, but the one outburst was all he had in him. As she watched, Swan put his forehead on the glass and closed his eyes.

  Swan wouldn’t have seen the zombie that attacked him even if his eyes had been open. Something huge and dead-of-night black came up from behind him and with the building so dark, it was for all intents and purposes, invisible. It was on Swan before anyone even knew it was there.

  It tried to tear out Swan’s throat, but its teeth broke on the armored collar. Then it tried to twist Swan’s head off. Swan, even taken by surprise, was not an easy kill. He threw his weight backwards, smashing into the beast and then swung around with his M4, knocking the rifle into the thing’s shoulder, giving himself just enough room to fire the gun three times, stitching holes in its chest, its throat and finally into its left eye.

  “Holy fuck!” he cried as the sounds of the gunshot echoed throughout the building. What the ever-loving fuck was…”

  Katherine shushed him and the five of them froze in place, listening as the building slowly came alive. There were more zombies lurking in the burned-out shadows and one was a very hungry nine-year-old. Jaimee Lynn Burke grinned up at the ceiling. She had the stairwells covered—her dinner was trapped.